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SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



y'^yi^ 



•s S ^ O 



A SHORT HISTORY 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



BY 



GEORGE SAINTSBURV 

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 



" But it needs happy vioments for this skill." — The Scholar Gipsy 






THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 
1898 

J "N \ All rights reserved 



15117 



Copyright, 1898, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 




301^98 )) 



jWOCOeicSRECElVEO* 



NorlnoolJ ^rtas 

J. S. Gushing fc Co. — Berwick k Smith 
Norwood Mtaa. U.S.A. 



. PREFACE 

The object of this book, which was undertaken more than four 
years ago, is to give, from the Hterary point of view only, and 
from direct reading of the Hterature itself, as full, as well sup- 
plied, and as conveniently arranged a storehouse of facts as the 
writer could provide. The substitution of bird's-eye views and 
sweeping generalisations for positive knowledge has been very 
sedulously avoided ; but it is hoped that the system of Inter- 
chapters will provide a sufficient chain of historical summary as to 
general points, such as, for instance, the nature and progress of 
English prosody and the periods of prose style. No part of the 
book has been delivered as lectures ; and the sections of it con- 
cerning the Elizabethan period and the Nineteenth Century are 
not replicas of previous work on those subjects. 

None but a charlatan will pretend that he has himself written, 
and none but a very unreasonable person will expect any one 
else to write, a history of the kind free from blunders.. The 
sincerest thanks are owed to Mr. W. P. Ker, Fellow of All Souls 
and Quain Professor of English Literature in University College, 
London, and to Mr. G. Gregory Smith, Lecturer in English in 
the University of Edinburgh, for their great kindness in reading 
the proofs of the book, and for their most valuable suggestions. 
But the author is wholly responsible, not merely for all the errors 



vi A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of fact that may have escaped their scrutiny, but for all the critical 
opinions put forward in the volume. Nor has his object been to 
make these opinions prominent, but rather to supply something 
approaching that solid platform, or at least framework, of critical 
learning without which all critical opinion is worthless, and upon 
which such opinion can be more easily built or hung afterwards. 
Reading of the books themselves is the only justification pre- 
cedent in such a case on the part of the writer ; and his only 
object should be to provoke and facilitate reading of the books 
themselves on the part of his readers. 

Edinburgh, 2.^tk July, 1898. 



CONTENTS 

« 

BOOK I 

THE PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
CHAPTER I 

THE EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 

PAGE 

Widsith — Beowulf — IValdhere and the Fight at Finnsburg — Dear . I 
CHAPTER II 

C^DMON, CYNEWULF, AND THOSE ABOUT THEM 

Anglo-Saxon poetry mostly sacred — MSB. — Cjedmon and Cynewulf — 
The Scriptural poems — Credmon — Judith — The Christ — The 
Lives of Saints — Other sacred poems — Secular poems — The Ruin 

— The IVanderer and Seafarer ....... 9 

CHAPTER III 

ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 

The works of King Alfred — The Boethius — The Orosius — The Bede 

— The Pastoral Care — The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — Elfric — 
Wulfstan ........... 19 

CHAPTER IV 

THE DECADENCE OF ANGLO-SAXON 29 

INTERCHAPTER I 32 

vii 



viii A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



BOOK II 

THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

CHAPTER I 

THE TRANSITION 

PAGE 

The sleep of English — Awakening influences — Latin — French influ- 
ence — Geoffrey of Monmouth — Latin prosody in the Early Middle 
Ages— The Hymns — Alliteration and rhyme — Rhythm and metre 
— French prosody — Syllabic equivalence in English — Helped by 
Anglo-Saxon — Law of pause in English 39 

CHAPTER II 

FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 

1 200-1250 

Layamon's Brui — The Or/mdum — Its spelling — Its metre — The 
J no-en Rhvlc — The Moral Ode — Genesis and Exodus — The 
^^^/,V,;-j,_The Orison of our Lady—Vtovtrhs of Alfred and 
Hcndyng — The Old and the Nighlingale 4^ 

CHAPTER III 

SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 

I 300- I 360 

Robert of Gloucester — Robert Manning — Lyrics— The Ayenbiie of 
Inwyt— The Northern Psalter — Manning — William of Shoreham 

— The Cursor Mundi — Hampole — Adam Davy — Laurence 
Minot — Cleanness and Patience — The Pearl .... 62 

CHAPTER IV 

EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 

Sir Tristrem-Havelok the Dane - King Horn- King Alisaunder 

— Arthour and Merlin — Nichard Coeur de Lion —The Seven 
Sages - Bevis of Hampton - Guy of Warwick - Ywain and 



CONTENTS 



Gazuain — Lybeatis Dcsconus — The King of Tars — Eiiiare — • 
Sir Orphco — Florence of Rome — The Earl of Toulouse — The 
Squire of Low Degree — Sir Cleges and Le- Fraine — Ipomydon — 
Amis and Amiloun — Sir Amadas — Sir Triamour — King Athcl- 
stone, etc. — The Thornton Romances — Charlemagne Romances . 82 

CHAPTER V 

EARLY ROMANCES — ALLITERATIVE 

Gazvain and the Green Knight — The Azvntyrs of Arthur — William 
of Paler ne — -Joseph of Arimathca — The Thornton Morte d\4rthure 
— The Destruction of Troy — The Pistyl of Susan . . .102 

INTERCHAPTER II 109 



BOOK III 

CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 
CHAPTER I 

CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 

Life — Probably spurious Tales — Other questioned work — The argu- 
ments for and against it — Admittedly genuine work — \rhe three 
periods — The Romauntofthe Rose — The Minor Poems — Troilus 
and Cressid — The House of Fame — The Legend of Good Women 
— The Canterbury Tales ■ . . , . . . .115 

CHAPTER II 

LANGLAND AND GOWER 

Piers Plozaman — Argument of the B Poem — Gower — The Confessio 

A mantis — Gower's reputation 131 

CHAPTER III 

CHAUCER'S PROSE — WYCLIF, TREVISA, MANDEVILLE 

Turning-point in prose — Chaucer's prose tales — His Boethius — The 
Astrolabe — Wyclif — John of Tre visa — Sir John Mandeville — 
The first prose style ......... 1415 



INTERCHAPTER III 



152 



X A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

BOOK IV 

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 
CHAPTER I 

THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS — LYDGATE TO SKELTON 

PAGn 
Contempt for fifteenth-century literature — Lydgate — Occleve — Boke- 
nam — Audelay and Minors — Hawes — The Pastime of Pleasure 

— The Example of Virtue — Barclay — The Ship of Fools — The 
Eclogues — Skelton — His Hfe — His poems 157 

CHAPTER II 

THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, AND MINOR 

Lateness of Scottish Literature — Barbour — Wyntoun — Blind Harry 

— Minors — Lyndsay — His life — His works — The Satire of the 
Three Estates — Minor poems 17^ 

CHAPTER III 

THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 

The King's Quair — Henryson — The Testament and Complaint of 
Creseide — The Fables — Kohene and Makyne — Minor poems — 
Dunbar — The Twa Maryit Wemen and the IVedo — Other large 
poems — Gawain Douglas — His life— His original poems— His 
Aeneid ....•••••••• 



180 



CHAPTER IV 

LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE 

Sir Generydes, etc. — Sir Launfal—Tht verse Morte Arthur — Cola- 5R5? '-.1 

gros and Gawane and Rauf Coilyear — Malory — Lord llerners — 
Caxton's translated romances 'y.) 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER V 

MINOR POETRY AND BALLADS 

PAGE 

Date of Ballads — The Niit-browne Alayde — " I sing of a maiden" — 

The Percy Folio — Graysieel 200 

CHAPTER VI 

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 

Importance of fifteenth-century prose — Pecock — His style and vocab- 
ulary — Fortescue, Capgrave, F^abyan — Caxton — Fisher — His 
advances in style — More — Latimer — Coverdale — Cranmer . 205 

INTERCHAPTER IV 215 



BOOK V 

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO THE DEATH 
OF SPENSER 

CHAPTER I 

PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 

Unbroken development of Drama from Miracle Plays — Origin of these 

— The Miracle-Play cycles, etc. — Non-sacred episodes — Morali- 
ties — The Four Elements — Other Interludes — John Heywood 
and The Four PP — liter sites — Other Interludes — Their drift — 
Bale's King John — Ralph Roister Doister — Gammer Gurton^s 
Needle — Gorhoduc — Other early attempts — The demand and the 
supply — Early plays by Gascoigne and others — Disputes as to plays 

— Difficulties in their way . . . . . . . .219 

CHAPTER II 

PRELIMINARIES — PROSE 

Elyot — The Governotir — Cavendish — Leland — Cheke — Wilson — 
Ascham — His Letters — Toxophihis — The Schoolmaster — Their . 
characteristics 234 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER III 

PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 

PAGE 

The state of poetry c. 1530— \Good effect of Italian — Wyatt's life — 
Surrey's— Wyatt's forms and subjects — Those of Surrey — The 
main characteristics of the pair — Wyatt's rhyme and rhythm — 
Surrey's metrical advance — TottePs Miscellany — Other miscella- 
nies — Verse translations — Churchyard — Whetstone — Tusser — 
Turberville — Googe — Gascoigne — His Instructions — His poems 

— '\\\^ Mirror for Magistrates — Sackville's part in it . . . 242 

CHAPTER IV 

SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 

The Leicester House circle — Sidney — His life — The sonnets — The 
Defence of Poesy — The Arcadia — Spenser — The " classical 
metre " craze — Other poets of Sidney's circle — Watson — Greville 

— Warner — The sonneteers of 1 592-96 — Constable — The satirists 260 

CHAPTER V 

THE UNIVERSITY WITS 

The general drama of 1570-90 — The University Wits — Lyly — His 
plays — Peele — Greene — Marlowe — Kyd — Lodge — Nash — 
Their work — Its kind in drama — Its vehicle in blank verse — 
Peek's plays — Those of Greene, Lodge, Nash, and Kyd — The 
lyrics of the group — Marlowe's plays ...... 2S0 

CHAPTER VI 

LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, PAMPHLETEERS, 
AND CRITICS 

Ascham's prose — Defects of the type — The ebb and flow of style — 
Euphuism — Euphues — Euphties, the Anatomy of Wit — Etiphues 
and his England — Their style — Its ancient instances — Its ver- 
nacularity — Its unnatural history — Hooker — Contemporaries of 
Lyly and Hooker — The translators — Their characteristics — The 
pamphleteers — Martin Marprelate — The critics .... 294 

INTERCHAPTER V 307 



CONTENTS 



BOOK VI 

LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE 
CHAPTER I 

SHAKESPEARE 

PAGE 

The luck of Jacobean literature — Concentration of the great drama in 
it — Shakespearian chronology — The life — The work — The 
poems — The Sonnets — Their formal and spiritual supremacy — 
Probable divisions of plays: the earlier — Their verse and phrase — 
Their construction — Their characters — The middle division : 
the Merry Wives — The Romantic comedies — The great tragedies, 
Roman and Romantic — Last plays — Doubtful plays . . • Z^i 

CHAPTER II 

SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 

Disposifiuii uf tVie subject — Chronological and biographical cautions — 
Ben Jonson — His and other " humour " — His plays — His verse 

— The three masterpieces — Later plays — 'Y\i& Masques— V>Q2i\x- 
mont and Fletcher — Their lives — Their characteristics — And 
merits — Specimen plays — Shadowy personality of other dramatists 

— Sufficiency of their work — Chapman — Marston — Dekker — 
Middleto- - Hey wood — Webster — His two great plays — Day — 
Tournear - ■ Rowley -....,... 330 

CHAPTER III 

THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 

Drayton —The Polyolbion — Other poems — Daniel — Sylvester Sir 

John Davies — Minor poets — Chapman — Fairfax — Campion 

The Spans- rians : minor poets — The Fletchers — Giles — Phineas 

— W. Brox'ne — Wither — Basse— The lyrical impulse — Jonson's 
poems — Lionne ^-q 



xiv A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER IV 

JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 

I PAGE 

Bacon — His life — His writings — His style — His use of figures — 
His rhetorical quality — Jonson's prose — The Discoveries — Their 
essay-nature — Protean appearances of essay — Overbury's Charac- 
ters — The Character generally — Burton — The Anatomy — His 
" melancholy " — His style — Sclden — The Authorised Version — 
Minors ............ 369 

CHAPTER V 

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — I 

Great pulpit oratory necessarily late — Function of sermons, 1600-1800 

— Andrewes — Ussher — Hall — Donne 382 

INTERCHAPTER VI 387 



BOOK VII 

CAROLINE LITERATURE 
CHAPTER I 

BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 

The central period of English prosody — Distribution of Caroline poetry 

— Milton — His life — The earlier poems — Cotnits — The blank 
verse — Lycidas — Sonnets — The longer poems — The blank verse 

— Their matter — Milton's place in English prosody — Cowley — 
His couplets — The lyrics — The Pindarics — Denham — Waller 

— The " reform of our numbers "....... 



CHAPTER II 

THE METAPHYSICALS — THE LYRIC POETS — THE MISCELLANISTS, ETC. 

Meaning of the term " metaphysical " — Crashaw — George Herbert — 
Vaughan — Herrick — Carew — Randolph — Habington — Cart- 
wright — Corbet — Suckling — Lovelace — Cleveland and others 
— Marvell — Bishop King — Sherburne, Godolphin, Stanley, Cot- 
ton, Brome — Quarles, More, Beaamont — Davenant — Chamber- 
layne — Miscellanies . ....,«• 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER III 

THE DRAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES 

PAGE 

Massinger — Ford — Shirley — Randolph — Suckling — Davenant — 

Brome — Nabbes and Davenport — Glapthorne .... 432 

CHAPTER IV 

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — II 

Jeremy Taylor — Fuller — South — Barrow — Baxter, Chillingworth, 

Hall, and others 439 

CHAPTER V 

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 

Milton's prose — Its faults and beauties — Sir Thomas Browne — Religio 
Medici — Vulgar Errors — Urn Burial — The Garden of Cyrus 
— Clarendon — Hobbes — Felltham — Howell — Walton . . 447 

CHAPTER VI 

SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE 

Reformation verse — Alexander Scott — Montgomerie — Sir Robert Ay- 
ton — The Earl of Stirling — Drummond — Prose — The Complaint 
of Scotland — Knox and Buchanan — King James — Sir Thomas 
Urquhart . 458 

INTERCHAPTER VII 467 



BOOK VIII 

THE X USTAN AGES 
I 

'^ •. EN — POETRY 

The term " August .ere — Dryden — His life — His 

] earlier poems - The Fal>lcs — His verse — But- 

ler — Resto . Marvell and Oldham . .47; 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH Lli'ERATURE 



CHAPTER II 

THE AGE OK DRYDEN — DRAMA 

PAGE 

The stage at the Restoration — The Heroic play — Dryden's comedies 

— Etherege — Shadvvell — Sedley — Mrs. Behn — Wycherley — 
The Rehearsal — The great artificial comedy — Congreve — Van- 
brugh — Farquhar — Gibber — Mrs. Gentlivre — Restoration tragedy 

— Dryden's Heroic plays — His blank-verse plays — His play-songs 
and prologues — Growne and Settle — Otway — Lee — Southerne 

and Rowe ........... 4S3 

CHAPTER III 

THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 

Tendency of Restoration prose — Its pioneers — Gowley's prose — Dry- 
den — Temple — Tillotson — Halifax — Sprat — The Royal Society 
and style — Bunyan — His four chief things — The English Rogue 
— Thomas Burnet — Glanvill — The Diarists — Evelyn — Pepys — 
Roger North — Minors — Locke — Degradation of style at the close 
of the century — L'Estrange — Collier — Tom Brown — Dunton . 506 

CHAPTER IV 

QUEEN ANNE PROSE 

Swift — His life — His verse — His prose — His quality and achieve- 
ment — The Essayists — Steele — His plays — Addison's life — His 
miscellaneous work — His and Steele's Essays — BentTey"— Middle- 
ton — Arbuthnot — Atterbury — Bolingbroke — Butler and other 
divines — Shaftesbury — Mandeville — Berkeley — Excellence of his 
style — Defoe 528 

CHAPTER V 

POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 

Divisions of eighteenth-century verse — Pope: his life — His work — 
His character — His poetry — His couplet and paragraph — His 
phrase — His subjects — Garth — lilackmore — Congreve, etc. — 
Prior — His metrical importance — Gay — Young — Parnell — Lady 
Winchelsea 549 



INTERCHAPTER VIII 



CONTENTS 



BOOK IX 

MIDDLE AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY 
LITERATURE 

CHAPTER I 

THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 

PAGE 

Thomson — His life — His minor poems — The Seasons — The Castle of 
Indolence — Dyer — Blair and Green — Shenstone — Collins — Gray 
— Byrom, Savage, and others — Akenside — Resurrection of thS 
Ballad : Percy and others — Dodsley's Miscellany — Smart — 
Mason — Falconer — The Wartons — Churchill — Chatterton — 
Beattie — Langhorne and Mickle — Cowper — Crabbe — Blake — 
Burns — His predecessors from Ramsay to Fergusson — His poetic 
quality 567 

CHAPTER II 

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 

Richardson — Fielding — Smollett — Sterne — Minor novelists — Wal- 

pole — Beckford — Mrs. Radcliffe — Lewis 598 

CHAPTER III 

JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 

Writers-of-all-work — Johnson's_life — His reputation — Work — And 

style — Goldsmith — His verse — His prose — Other essayists . 613 

CHAPTER IV 

THE GRAVER PROSE 

Lateness of history in English — Hume — Robertson — Minors — Gib- 
bon — The Atdohiography — The Decline and Fall — His style — 
Burke — His rhetorical supremacy — Qualities of his style and 
method — Theology and Philosophy — Warburton — Paley — Adam 
Smith — G' i»"i'' — His importance and position .... 622 



xviii A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER V 

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 



I'AGE 



The conundrum of the drama — Fading of eighteenth-century tragedy — 
Minor comic writers : the domestic play — Goldsmith — Sheridan — 
His three great pieces 636 



CHAPTER VI 

MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 



The letter-writers — Lady Mary — Chesterfield — Horace Walpolc — 

"Junius" — Boswell 642 

INTERCHAPTER IX 649 



BOOK X 

THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE 
CHAPTER I 

THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 

The turning-point — Coleridge — His criticism — Wordsworth — His 
inequality — His theories — His genius and its limitations — Southey 
— Scott — His poetical quality — Byron — His reputation — And 
contribution to English poetry — Shelley — His poems and his 
poetry — Keats — Landor — Moore — Campbell .... 653 

CHAPTER II 

THE NOVEL — SCO'lT AND MISS AUSTEN 

'I'he novel, c. 1800-1814 — Scott's adoption of it — Waverley and its 
successors — His general achievement — Miss Austen — Miss Edge- 
worth — Miss Ferrier — Gait — Ainsworth and James — Lord 
Beaconsfield — Bulwer-Lytton — Others : Lockhart — Peacock — 
Lever — Marryat — Michael Scott — Hook and others . . . 677 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER III 

THE NEW ESSAY 

PAGE 

Progress and defects of the earlier essay — Magazines and Reviews — 
The Edinburgh: Jeffrey — Its contributors: Scott's criticism — 
Brougham — Sydney Smith — The Quarterly — The new Maga- 
zine — Blackzvood's : " Christopher North " — Lockhart — The Lon- 
don — Laiiib^ Leigh Hunt — Hazlitt — De Quincey — Landor's 
prose — Cobbett .......... 691 

CHAPTER IV 

THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 

Southey's prose — Historical writing : Mitford, Roscoe, and others — 
Hallam — Milman — Arnold, Grote, and Thirlwall — Mackintosh 
and Bentham — Macaulay ........ 706 

CHAPTER V 

THE MINOR rOETS OF 180O-183O 

Rogers — Leigh Hunt and Hogg — A group of minors — Elliott, Mrs. 
Hemans, and " L. E. L." — Hood — Praed — Macaulay — Hawker 
and Barnes — Hartley Coleridge — Sir H.Taylor — Home — Bar- 
ley — Beddoes . . . . . . . . . • 7^5 

INTERCHAPTER X 724 



BOOK XI 

VICTORIAN LITERATURE 
CHAPTER I 

TENNYSON AND BROWNING 

jnnyson: his early work and its character — The volumes of 1S42 — 
His later life and works — T/ie Princess — In A/emoritrm — Maud 
— The Idylls of the King, etc. — Robert Browning — Periods of his 
work — His favourite method — His real poetical appeal — Edward 
FitzGerald — Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . . . 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER II 

THE VlCl'OKIAN NOVEL 

PAGE 

Dickens — Thackeray — His early work — Charlotte Bronte — Mrs. 
CJaskell — Cliaries Reade — Anthony TroUope — George Eliot — 
Charles Kingsley — Others — R. L. Stevenson .... 740 

CHAPTER III 

HISTORY AND CRITICISM ■ 

Carlyle — His life and works — His genius — His style — Kinglake — 
Buckle — Freeman — Green — Froude — Matthew Arnold — Mr. 
Ruskin — • Art in English literature — Symonds — Pater . . . 758 

CHAPTER IV 

POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 

Matthew Arnold — The " Spasniodics " — Clough — Locker — The Earl 
of Lytton — The Pre-Raphaelites — Their preparation — Dante and 
Christina Rossetti — William Morris — O'Shaughnessy — Others . 774 

CHAPTER V 

MISCELLANEOUS 

J. S. Mill — Manscl — John Austin — Others — Newman — Borrow — 
Others — Science — Darwin — The Vestiges — Hugh Miller — Hux- 
ley 787 

CONCLUSION 795 

INDEX 799 



BOOK I 

THE PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
CHAPTER I 

THE EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 
Widsith — Beowulf — Waldhere and the Fight at Finiisburg — Deor 

The oldest document which has a possibly authentic claim to be 
English Literature,^ if but English Literature in the making and far oft 
completion, is the poem commonly called IVidsit/i, from its opening 
word, which some take to be a proper name.'^ Others „^., ., 

I • • 1 1 • ■ r ,, r 11 1 „ • IVlJsitk. 

smiply see m it the designation or a "tar-travelled singer, 
who here recounts his journeyings in 143 lines of no great literarj 
beauty, and only interesting as sketching the gainful and varied life oi 
a minstrel in the Dark Ages, were it not for the proper names which 

1 Fuller English treatments of this matter will be found in Mr. Stopford Brooke's 
History of Early English Literature ; in Mr. H. Morley's English Writers, vols. i. 
and ii. ; in Professor Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature ; and in the translation o* 
Ten Brink's English Literature, vol. i. The texts discussed in this chapter form 
the first five numbers of Grein-Wul(c)ker's Bibliothek der angelsachsischen Poesie, 
vol. i., pp. 1-277, which gives two texts oi Beowulf. This latter has been frequently 
edited and translated ; Professor Earle's Deeds of Beowulf is a good translation 
without text. 

'■^ Some high authorities, looking upon Widsith as a " made-up " thing, hold it 
to be later, and would assign the priority to the Finnsburg fragment or others. No 
opinion one way or the other is expressed here ; indeed, the writer holds that 
the evidence is insufficient for adopting any. But it may be convenient to make 
the point an occasion in limine for a respectful request to readers not to taki- 
absence of mention of theories of this kind, or statements in the text apparently 
antagonistic to them, as proof of ignorance on the writer's part. This book 
attempts to be a history, not of the latest or any opinions about literature, but of 
that literature itself. The practically endless questions of authenticity, integrity, 
date, and so forth must be, as a rule, left to special study. 



2 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE nooK i 

bestrew the piece. Not a few of tliese occur, or seem to occur, in 
other early verse, and have the interest of the "parallel passage." But 
three are, or seem to be, those of persons well known to history — 
Eormanric or Hermanric,^ King of the Goths ; ^tla or Attila, the 
Scourge of God and the King of the Huns ; and, lastly, a certain 
^Ifwine, whom some think identical with Alboin or Albovine, King 
of the Lombards, the husband, the insulter, and the victim of 
Rosmunda. It is, of course, obvious at once that though it is not 
impossible for the same man to have been contemporary with Her- 
manric, who died in 375, and Attila, who died in 433, no con- 
temporary of either could have seen the days of Alboin, who felt his 
wife's revenge in 572. Therefore either ^Ifwine must be somebody 
else or the poem is doubtful. Into such discussions this book will 
never enter, unless there is the strongest reason of a purely literary 
character for them, and there is none such here. It is sufficient to 
say that if Eormanric is the Hemianric known to history, and if 
'' Widsith " saw his day, this document dates within the confines of 
the fourth century, at a time when no other modern language can 
show proofs of having had even a rudimentary existence. 

The MS., the famous Exeter Book^ of gehwilcum \Hugui?i 
(" things of sorts "), which Bishop Leofric gave to his Cathedral some 
700 years later than Hermanric's day, and which still remains there, 
could, of course, not be expected to give us the original form of the 
" word-hoard," of which 'n his first line ^ the Far-Traveller declares the 
unlocking. Yet it shows us a language very remote indeed from English 
in appearance (though this s^me word "'• word-hoard," which appears 
with the omission of a single letter, shows the remoteness to be more 
apparent than real), but also different from Continental Old-Saxon, 
and from Icelandic, its nearest relations, neighbours, and contempo- 
raries. This language — a point more important to literature — is 
arranged, or can be arranged, in lines of not strictly regular length, 
and obeying no law of rhythm that apparently resembles those of any 
niodern or classical prosody, except that there is a sort of far-off echo of 
trochaic cadence, and that the lines approach the ordinary octosyllable 
or dimeter more than any other form. There is no rhyme, for though 
il is by no means uncommon for two or more adjacent lines to end in 
the same syllable, this syllable is one on which the voice would lay no 
stress. Neither is there assonance or vowel-rhyme, the preliminary 

1 See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. x.wi. 

2 Ed. Thorpe (London, 1842) ; in course of re-editing for the Early Enijlish 
T>;xt Society by I. Gollancz (vol. i. London, 1895), in both cases with translations. 
1;^ contents will be noted later. 

3 Widsith mathohide : word-hord onleas = " Widsith spoke, (he) unlocked (his) 
wurd-hoard." 



EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 



to rhyme itself in most of the Romance tongues. But there is a very 
curious, though, in IVtdsit/i, elusive and irregular, system of allitera- 
tion, by which certain words, often, though far from always, two in the 
earlier half of the line and one in the later, begin either with the same 
consonant or with a vowel. And it is further usually arranged that the 
stress, accent, length, or whatever word be preferred, shall fall on these 
alhterated syllables whether it falls on others or not.^ As for the 
purely literary characteristics, the nature of the piece, which, as 
has been said, is little more than a catalogue of names, gives very 
small scope. Imaginative critics have, however, discovered in it that 
specially English delight in roving which has distinguished many of 
our race — as well as, for instance, such hardly English persons as 
Ulysses and Sindbad. 

There are names in IVidsith — Heorot, Hrothgar, and others — 
which connect the poem, so far as they go, with one of much greater 
extent, interest, and merit, though, if the furthest age which each can 
reasonably claim be assigned, decidedly younger. This 
IS the famous Beowulf, accordmg to some the first on the 
beadroll of substantive and noteworthy poems in English, using that 
word in the most elastic sense, and according to all who have given 
themselves the trouble (now minimised by scholarly assistance, if the 
help of the scholars be taken and their snares resisted) to acquaint 
themselves with it, a saga of undoubted age, originality, and interest. 
Adopting the same system which we adopted in the case of IVidsith, 
that of selecting the earliest dated name that can be reasonably 
identified with one mentioned in the poem, Beowulf, so far as subject 
goes, would be as old as the second decade of the sixth century, 520 
or a little earlier, when a certain fairly historical Chochilaicus raided 
the Frisian coast, according to Gregory of Tours. This Chochilaicus 
is plausibly conjectured to be the Hygelac of the poem. But beyond 
this it will not be safe to go, for scholarly conjecture, or perhaps it 
were better to say conjectural scholarship, has for the better part of a 
century let itself loose over the date, scene, meaning, and composition 
of the piece. Whether it was brought from Jutland by the Saxon 
invaders and Anglicised or was composed in England itself; whether 
the scenery is that of the east or the west coasts of the North Sea ; 
whether it is an entire poem or a congeries of ballads ; whether it is 
a literal history embellished poetically, a deliberate romance, or a 

iThis account of prosody is based in the first place on Wid-sith, and is not 
intended as controversial against those who, with Dr. Sievers. insist on the exact 
character of the Anglo-Saxon scheme such as it was. It acquired, no doubt, a good 
deal of such exactness in time ; though any one who will reflect on the conse- 
quences of the fact that the texts exist almost invariably in single MSS., will be 
slow to accept any but wide conclusions. 



PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



myth — all these questions have been asked with the pains, answered 
with the conlidence, and the answers all poohpoohed with the disdain 
usual, if not invariable, in such cases. We shall only say here that the 
date, admittedly uncertain, is somewhat unimportant ; that the ques- 
tion " History, fiction, or myth ? '' is not of the kind here dealt with ; 
and that while some have been hardy enough to pronounce with 
confidence that the scenery must be Northumbrian and no other, i the 
present writer would undertake to find twenty coast districts in Eng- 
land, and feels certain that there are twenty times twenty and more 
also out of it, which would perfectly fit. 

To the student of literature who can be content to pretermit the 
unnecessary, Beoiviilf presents itself in a manner which may be sum- 
marised as follows : It is a poem, in rather less than 3200 lines, 
which must of necessity be very old, and which, for reasons to 
be mentioned presently, is in its original form very likely as old as, 
or older than, all but the first invasion of Britain by the Saxons 
The history of its unique MS.,- though too long to be given in 
detail here, adds to its interest. This is part of one (Vitellius A. 
XV.) of those famous treasures of Sir Robert Cotton's which form 
almost the most precious part of the British Museum Library, and 
one of those which were only saved so as by fire in 173 1. It is 
not known where it came from, and though it was catalogued by 
Humphrey Wanley a quarter of a century before the fire, he unfort- 
unately mistook its subject, and the interest which then still pre- 
vailed as to Anglo-Saxon literature (though it afterwards waned for 
the greater part of the century) was not immediately directed to 
it. Its supposed connection with Denmark, in Wanley's description, 
attracted the learned Icelander Thorkelin to it, and, after vicissi- 
tudes, his version appeared in 181 5, since which it has been con- 
stantly re-edited and translated. Meanwhile the MS. had been going 
from worse to worse ever since the fire, and the superstructure of com- 
mentatorial editing has been constantly adding more and more super- 
fluous matter. One of the few if not facts yet opinions wliich seem worth 
holding fast is that in its present form the MS. is probal:ily not older 
than the tenth century, and that tlie poem had by that time under- 
gone divers changes in shape and dialect. Another fact of the first 
literary value is that the chief incidents of its first part reproduce 
themselves in the most curious way in one of the five great Icelandic 
sagas, that of Grettir the Strong. ^ 

1 For is there not a Bowlby Cliff close to Staithcs in Yorkshire? and is it not 
the tallest on the English and Scottish mainland? and does not Bowlby = Bow- 
wowlljy = Beowulfby? And did not Ca>dmon live at Whitby, a few miles off? 
Indeed, for a commentatorial sorites the logic is rather unusually perfect. 

2 Which also contains Judith ; see next chajiter. 

3 Englished by Morris and Magnussou, London, 1869. 



EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON TOETRY 



As for its subject, there is, as is very usual in poems of its class, a 
sort of genealogical prologue wherein there is a confusion of Beowulfs. 
The proper action does not begin for a hundred lines or so, when we 
hear of) the happiness of Hrothgar, a king whose court is at Heorot, 
and its marring by a monster named Grendel who enters the hall by 
night and slaughters the thanes. This continues for twelve years, till 
Beowulf, our Beowulf, a thane of King Hygelac's, who dwells over the 
sea, hears of the nuisance and determines to end it. He journeys 
towards Heorot, and, after some demurs by the coastguard thereof, 
arrives and is hospitably received by Hrothgar and his queen, 
though there is some jealousy among the nobility. The adventure is 
committed to Beowulf, and Grendel does not fail to come at night. 
Indeed, he has seized one warrior before Beowulf grips him. Then 
begins the first and not one of the worst of the fights of English 
poetry — which has good fights. The monster is not vulnerable by 
steel, so that Beowulf's men cannot lielp him ; but the chief tears off 
the fiend's arm, shoulder and all, and he flies to die in the mei'e where 
his den is, making it boil with his blood. There is much triumph, 
feasting, singing, gift-giving, and the like. 

But after all Something renews the attacks on Heorot, and an 
etheling of high blood is carried off. Beowulf is not in the hall, 
having been guested elsewhere, but he soon hears from the King that 
his adventure is not done, and determines to finish it in the mere 
itself. He dives fearlessly in, and on reaching the bottom is caught 
by a water-hag, Grendel's mother, who has killed the etheling. 
The fight is fiercer than that with her son ; the hero's earthly 
weapons are useless against the hag, and he is actually beaten by her 
in wrestling and for a moment at her mercy. But his byrnie (mail- 
shirt) is better as a defence than his sword in offence, and hard by 
him, on the cave floor where the fight takes place, he sees a mighty 
falchion within reach. He gains it, draws it, and cuts the hag's 
head off", doing the same afterwards to the dead body of Grendel, 
which he finds near by ; but the blood of the fiends is so venomous 
that the sword itself, though it had strength to slay, melts in the 
poison. 

iVIeanwhile Beowulf's men above on the bank have given him up 
for lost, and Hrothgar's men have gone away. But his own comrades 
remain, welcome him as he swims up triumphantly with Grendel's 
head, and escort him m triumph to court with the head and tlie hilt 
of the sword. The most interesting part of the poem is over, but 
only just half its length is exhausted. Proper ceremonies at Heorot 
follow, and a long report of Beowulf to Hygelac. This king falls 
in battle (perhaps, as said above, historically), and Beowulf succeeds 
him, to be plagued in his turn not by a water fiend but by a land 



TRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



dragon, whose hoard has been rifled, and who in revenge lays waste 
the country, burning all houses, even the palace, with his fiery breath. 
Beowulf determines to meet him single-handed and does so, all his 
men but one flying in terror. He slays the dragon, but is mortally 
injured by the teeth and fire-jets of the enemy. The poem finishes 
with laments, condemnation of the cowardly fliers, and the rummag- 
ing of the dragon's hoard. 

The vehicle of it is a line of the same kind (with minor variations) 
as that described under ll'idsit/i, but the different nature of the sub- 
ject (and, no doubt, also the greater genius of the author, and the 
wider scope afforded) raises it much above that composition as poetry. 
As is the case with all the pieces in this section, it has been rather 
wildly and unreservedly praised, and has been made to bear all sorts 
of meanings and messages which the unilluminated may fail to dis- 
cover. But it is a good verse-saga, spirited in incident, not destitute 
of character, and showing, though an early and rudimentary, yet a by 
no means clumsy or puerile system of poetic phrase, composition, and 
tliought. The fights are good fights ; Beowulf, though, as we should 
expect, something of a boaster, is a gentleman and a tall man of his 
hands. Hunferth, Hrothgar's jealous courtier and "orator," is, after 
his fashion, a gentleman too — it is he who lends Beowulf a sword 
for the second encounter; the appearance of Hrothgar's queen is 
gracious ; the pictures of the sea and the mere (its waters over- 
shrouded by trees with writhen roots), and the spear-stalks in the 
hall, ash-staved and gray-steel-tipped, are not to be despised. 

Tliis is the verdict of the strictest criticism of intrinsic merit, 
putting the historic estimate aside altogether. And if, as we are 
surely entitled to do in a history, we do not put the historic estimate 
aside — if we take into consideration the fact, which is all but a certain 
fact, that Beowulf is the very oldest poem of any size and scope in 
any modern language, that it has no known predecessors,^ and has 
the whole literature of romance for successors — then without attribut- 
ing to it merits which it cannot claim, or muddling it up with myths 
which simply minish its interest, we shall see that it is a very 
venerable document indeed, well worth the envy of the nations to 
whom it does not belong. Even if it were no older than its iVIS., 
Beo-duulf would be the senior of the Chanson de Roland by nearly a 
century, the senior of the Poema del Cid by two, the senior of the 
N'ihclungen Lied by two or three. In reality it is possibly the elder 
of the eldest of these by half a millennium. Some of those who love 

1 There are, of course, those who say that it had many. But, if so, these many 
"have the defect of being lost," and perhaps it may be said also that of not being 
known ever to have existed. The text speaks only of known and existing work of 
epical form. 



EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 



England least have been fain to admit that we have the best poetry in 
Europe ; it is thanks mainly to Beowulf that our poetry can claim the 
oldest lineage, and poetical coat-armour from the very first. 

The other remains which certainly or jorobably belong to the same 
class chronologically with IVidsith and Beo%uulf are of much shorter 
length, and, with one exception, of less interest. The fragment 
(about sixty lines) called IValdhere ("Walter") would seem to belong 
to an old, if not oldest, edition, so to speak, of that cycle of Burgim- 
dian sagas of which the Nibehifigen Lied presents us with 
a later handling, though this particular fragment has and'the 
nothing to do with that poem. So, too, the Fii^/it at ^'.^''^ "^ 
Fiiinsbici-g (htty lines), another fragment, has for its main, 
if not its sole, English interest, besides the language, the fact that 
the subject is mentioned in Beotuulf as the theme of song, though, 
of course, not necessarily of this song. But the third, the fifth of the 
whole group as usually arranged, has greater attractions. This is the 
so-called Cof/iplaint of Deor, which in the first place is, though a 
short, a complete piece ; in the second, has not merely unity as a 
composition, but individual spirit and interest as a poem ; 
and in the third, shows us an immense advance in poetical 
form. Deor is a minstrel who has fallen out of favour with his lord, 
his supplanter being a certain Heorrenda, skilled in song. The fifty- 
two verses of the poem are individually like those already noticed, 
but they are arranged in a different fashion, being divided into stanzas 
of irregular length by a refrain — 

Th^es ofereode : thisses swa mceg. 
That was got over : so may this be. 

The instances which he alleges to confirm himself in his hoc oliin 
nioninisse J2ivabit, the trials of VVayland the great smith, the betrayal 
of Beadohild, with other woes of Geat, of Theodoric, of Hermanric, 
have some attraction of curiosity, and the general tone of pluck facing 
luck is manly and interesting. But the advance in form is the real 
charm of the poem. If Deor is really very old, its author had 
attained, though only in a rough and rudimentary fashion, to some of 
those secrets of lyrical poetry which were as a rule hidden from 
Anglo-Saxon bards even of a much later day. He had grasped the 
stafiza, the great machine for impressing form upon the ahnost form- 
less void ; ^ and he had grasped the refrain, which is not only a 
mighty set-off to poetry in itself, but has the inestimable property of 
naturally suggesting rhyme, the greatest and most precious of all 
poetical accidents. When th"; ear has once caught the charm of 

1 There is a theory that the stanza came first; but here ag.iiii all the other 
examples are lost, and none arc Unovvn to have existed. 



8 rRi:LIM[NARIES OF ENCLISII LITERATURE 



repeated sound in this way, the brain almost inevitably suggests the 
multiplication of it without damage to sense, by repeating not the 
whole line but part of the line only. We have not in Dear reached 
really exquisite poetry, but we are safely on the way towards it. We 
have the passionate interpretation of things felt and seen ; we have 
the couching of that interpretation in rh}thmical utterances subjected 
to and equipped with arrangements and ornaments beyond those of 
the mere integral line ; and we have the confinement of the utterance 
within a reasonable length. When you have these things in poetry, 
you have not yet everything, but you are on the way to have it. 

The reserved point, in reference to this batch of poems, which has 
been more than once mentioned above is this : that in no one of them 
is there the slightest evidence, apart from their existence in more or 
less antique forms of Anglo-Saxon, of any connection with England. 
The supposed indications of scenery are, as has been said above, and 
must be very seriously repeated, the shadow of a shade, the dream of 
a dream ; no one who has had any share of training in the apprecia- 
tion of evidence will attach the slightest importance to them. There 
are passages in IVidsith, in Bccnvitlf, in Deor, which seem to argue a 
knowledge of Christianity ; but all of these may be interpolations, and 
none of them is decisive to a balanced judgment. And such historical 
or quasi-historical references (the more important noted above) as we 
do find seem to carry us back to periods about the fourth and fifth 
centuries ; while there is nothing in any of them, except the quite 
indecisive Alboin identification, which suggests a date later than 500, 
and nothing, even this, that goes later than 600. 

Therefore it has seemed to no bad wits not impossible, or even 
improbable, that this group may represent the documents, certainly 
not " fifty volumes long," or at least the traditions, which the Anglo- 
Saxon-Jutes carried with them as " cabin-furniture " in their invasion of 
the Greater England, and may actually be the workings up of such 
documents, or at least such traditions, not so very much later. We 
cannot prove this, and we should very carefully abstain from the large 
generalisations from supposed characteristics in these poems which 
have sometimes been made as to the English spirit. Indeed, we 
sliould rather say that ascertained or imagined characteristics of the 
I^nglish spirit are in these exercitations carried back to the poems, 
and discovered there after having been carried. But we cannot dis- 
prove either the antiquity or the relationship, and it would be a great 
pity if we could. 



CHAPTER II 

C/EDMON, CYNEWULF, AND THOSE ABOUT THEM 

Anglo-Saxon poetry mostly sacred — MSS. — Cajdinon and Cynewulf — The 
Scriptural poems — Ccedmon — Judith — The Christ — ^The Lives of Saints — 
Other sacred poems — Secular poems — The Ruin — The Wanderer and Sea- 
farer. 

It would seem likely that the whole of the work mentioned in the 
last chapter, though it may liave been here and there rehandled in a 
Christian sense, is heathen in origin. But the bulk of Anglo-Saxon 
poetry,! ^ l^uj]^ which is not itself very large, is entirely 
Christian in tone, and is definitely religious in subject, poefry mostly 
Probably not a twentieth part of the CorpJts Poeticitm sacred, 
in oldest English, putting Becnvulf aside, has for subject anything but 
paraphrases of the Bible and Lives of Saints, which in their turn are 
paraphrased or translated from Latin originals. Although the texts 
are handled in some cases with sufficient freedom, it is undeniable 
that this fact communicates to Anglo-Saxon poetry not merely a cer- 
tain monoton}', but also a very distinct want of first-hand interest — 
a want which extends over its whole period, and to prose as well as 
to verse. 

Yet it would have been extremely surprising if anything else had 
been the case. In the first place, it is always necessary to remember — 
especially in face of the extravagant eulogies of which it has been the 
subject, as a revulsion from the equally extravagant, and because 
more simply ignorant much more discreditable, contempt which it 
had undergone before — that this literature is, after all, the literature 
of a childhood, the lispings of a people. No vernacular writings 
other than their own can have been before these ancestors of ours, 
for none existed. Although, after the welter of the Saxon Conquests 
had a little subsided, culture of no such beggarly kind was to be found 
in England, it was necessarily, if not confined to, yet centred in, the 

1 Most of the texts referred to in this chapter will be found in Grein-Wul(c)ker 
or the E.xeter Book, or both; where to find the others will be noted. 

9 



lo PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i 

clergy and the monasteries. More classical knowledge, not merely 
in Latin but in Greek, undoubtedly survived during the darkest of the 
Dark Ages than the sciolism of the eighteenth century used to allow ; 
but there is also no doubt that the tide — the incalculable, inexplicable 
tide of knowledge and thought — receded steadily all over Europe 
from the fifth century to the tenth. In the first years (which in such 
an age are the first centuries) of conversion to a new faith religious 
zeal thinks no subject but religion worthy of attention, and in the 
contented reaction therefrom professional guardians of religion think 
nothing but religious matter worthy of jjreservation. It is more 
Vv'Onderful that we have any profane poetry at all — not for the present 
to mention prose — from this time, than that we have so little. 

The verse, profane in small proportion, sacred in large, which 
dates from the period succeeding the comparative settlement of the 
Saxon realms, and which, though almost the whole, if not the whole, 
of it is West Saxon in its present form, seems by pretty common consent 
to have been originally composed in Northumbria, survives to us for 
the most part in four unique MSS. Of these three are 
the aforesaid Cottonian, which, besides giving us Beowulf, 
contains an incomplete poem on Judith ; the so-called Junian Manu- 
script, now at Oxford, which contains the poems attributed to Caed- 
mon, four in number, three of which are paraphrases of the books of 
Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, while the fourth is a composite piece 
to which tlie title of Clirist and Satan has been given ; and the Exeter 
Book, containing, besides Widsith and Dear, a poem or poems on 
Christ, others on Azariah (one of the Three Children), St. Guthlac, 
and St. Juliana, a large collection of verse-riddles, and not a few 
smaller poems, sacred and profane, the complete list being given in a 
note.i The fourth, called the Vercelli Book, from its rather unex- 
pected place of discovery sixty years ago, gives among Homilies a 
variant of one of the poems (the Address of the Soul to the Body) in 
the Exeter Book, two very interesting Lives of Saints, St. Andrew and 
St. Helena, the Dream of the Rood, which is at least of the highest 
interest as a puzzle, a short poem on the Fates of the Apostles, and 
a fragment on Human Falsehood. 

Some notice of the more remarkable contents and characteristics 
of these poems will be given presently. As to their authorship, 
which has been much discussed, we practically know nothing whatever 

•1 First come a score of pieces arranged by the Germans and Mr. Gollancz, as 
Christ; then Guthlac, Azarias, The Phanix, Juliana, The Wa)iderer, Tlie Endow- 
vicnts of Men, A Father's Instruction, The Seafarer, A Monitory Poem, Widsith 
(" The Sc6p"), The Fortunes of Men, Gnomic Verses, Wonders of Creation, The 
Khyming Poem, The Panther, The Whale, The Soul to the Body, Deor, Riddles 
(in three batches), The Exile's Complaint, A Fragment (sometimes interpreted 
differently), Tlic Ruin, and a few minor pieces. 



C^DMON, CYNE' ^ f- fC. 



about it in any case. But the Venerable Bedt, in a charmingly told 
and commonly known story, has related how a certain Caedmon, who 
towards the end of the seventh cent'.u-y was a servant 
of the monastery of Whitby, under the ^reat abbe.->s Hilda, and 

having had to leave festive meetings owing to his inability Cynewulf. 
to use and accompany with song the harp which was handed round, 
was miraculously inspired to write sacied poetry. And the contents 
of the Junian MS. were, from the first attention paid to it in Milton's 
days, identified with this, while much later the discovery on the 
Ruthwell Cross, some miles from Dumfries, of the words " Caedmon 
made me," forming part of a Runic inscription (the rest of which 
coincided pretty closely with part of the JJream of the Rood above 
mentioned), was for a time thought lu confirm the idea. Again, 
examiners of the poetry of the Exeter and Vercelli Books found in 
some of them Runic charades or acrostics which compose the name 
"Cynewulf"'; and out of these dead runes a great poet who wrote 
not merely the poems in which they appear but others has been 
resolutely manufactured and equipped with a life, sentiments, and 
experiences extracted by critical imagination from the poems in ques- 
tion. Further, the work formerly attributed to Caedmon has been 
taken to pieces with the usual industry and dexterity of the Sepa- 
ratists, and a considerable portion of it heaped upon Cynewulf, with 
the corresponding industry and dexterity of the Agglomerators ; 
the Dream of the Rood has been confidently assigned to the new 
favourite ; and the poems in general have been divided into A's and 
B's, credited or debited with interpolations, dated, redated, and 
undated. In particular, much stress has been laid on the recent dis- 
covery of corresponding Old-Saxon fragments of a Genesis version in 
the Vatican. 

But with these things we do not busy ourselves. The testimony 
of so trustworthy a historian as Bede establishes the existence of a 
Whitby poet named Caedmon, who, miraculously or otherwise, dis- 
played sudden and unexpected faculties for song, and composed poems 
on the Creation and several other Biblical subjects before the end of 
the seventh century. The Ruthwell Cross ^ and a leliquary preserved 
at Brussels show phrases and passages taken, or very slightly altered, 
from the Dream of the Rood. From the well-ascertained historical facts 

iThis extremely interesting monument is now well ca\ed for and enshrined 
conveniently for inspection in an apse built for it in Ruthwell Parish Church. It 
was ordered for destruction in the evil days of the seventeenth century (1642), but 
only broken into three pieces and left in the churchyard, where it remained till 
1802. It was then set up in the manse garden, and in 1887 put in its present 
place. There is a facsimile of the cross (which is nearly 18 feet high, and may 
date from the end of the seventh century) in the Museum of Science and Art, 
Edinburgh. 



12 PRELIiMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i 

of the superiority of Northern to Southern culture, and of the complete, 
or almost complete, destruction of both, but especially the former, 
by the Danish fury at the end of the eighth century and later, it is 
reasonable to conclude that these poems were written in Northumbria, 
and before 800. But of the exact date and the exact authorship of 
no one of them can anything be said to be certainly known ; and if 
the rune-charade of Cynewulf is correctly deciphered, this signature 
cannot be accepted as going more than a very little way to establish 
even the most shadowy personality. As for their autobiographic 
character, it will be time to take this seriously when it is shown 
that the author of Maud, who, it may be pointed out, certainly did 
visit Brittany like its hero, also shot his beloved's brother in a duel, 
and passed some time in a madhouse afterwards. 

We are therefore left with the poems themselves, and they will 
afford us quite sufficiently interesting study. In the all-important 
point of prosodic form they resemble those mentioned in the last 
chapter, except that in some at least the alliteration is still more 
precisely managed ; while in others, especially in the poems first 
attributed to Caedmon, the line is almost indefinitely extended at 
times by the admission of unaccented syllables, so that it becomes 
more impossible than ever to adjust the whole to any rhythmical 
swing tunable to modern ears. Even the comparatively rudimentary 
metrical nisus of Dear does not seem to have agitated any of these 
singers, and if it were not for the accented and alliterative syllables, 
the whole would bear the appearance of embryonic rhythmed prose, 
for which it was actually taken until the scheme of Anglo-Saxon 
prosody was discovered. 

Of their subjects, and of the extent to which they display such 
non-metrical properties of poetry as phrase, arrangement, and poetic 
spirit, there is naturally more to be said. In regard to subject, they 
may be divided into three groups, — the directly sacred poems with a 
fringe of allegorical verse, in which the fantastic zoology of the Dark 
and Middle Ages is adjusted not unhappily to religious use ; a very 
small but very precious body of poetry without a purpose, or with 
only a subordinate one ; and a miscellaneous collection of riddles, 
charms, gnomic verses, and " oddments " of different kinds. The 
last group is chiefly, if not wholly, interesting to the philologist and 
the student of manners and civilisation, though some of the riddles 
have not a little poetical merit ; the others are of wider appeal.^ 

1 Anglo-Saxon poetry in translation is best represented by a very close render- 
ing, stave for stave, with the words kept as far as possible and their order like- 
wise. Straightforward modern prose may come next; any modern English verse- 
form last, the resemblances and the differences of language and rhythm alike 
making it dangerously misrepresent.itive. 



CHAP. II C^DMON, CYNEWULF, ETC. 13 

The sacied poems may again be subdivided into three classes, — 
paraphrases from the Scriptures or poems directly based on them, 
Lives of Saints, and miscellaneous devotional work. 

Of the first subdivision, the chief interest, if not the chief merit, 
belongs to the Ca;dmonian Genesis and Exodus, especially to the 
passages in tlie former which respectively bring to mind the 
Bede story, and the supposed indebtedness of Milton in ji^^ Scriptural 
Paradise Lost to the eldest of his poetical forefathers, poems, 
with whose work he might actually have been acquainted 
through his friend Junius the editor. With regard to the first 
point, no actual English equivalent of Bede's Latin abstract or 
paraphrase (he warns us that it is only this) occurs in Caedmon ; 
but there is in one MS. of the History a very old and possibly 
original Northumbrian version, transliterated into West Saxon in 
King Alfred's English Bede. Neither of these agrees in wording 
with the opening of the so-called Genesis A, but the meaning is 
sufficiently near to suggest diiferent wordings of the same original 
draft. As for the Miltonic parallels, some of which are extraor- 
dinarily close, they come chiefly but not wholly from the other 
part or Genesis B, where the paraphrast is drawing on apocryphal 
or mediaeval legend (and himself) for a description of the sufferings 
of the Fallen Angels. Both parts of Genesis and Exodus have, when 
the subject gives opportunities, bursts of poetry by no means con- 
temptible, and by no means wholly due to the original ; and the first 
named is a poem very considerable in bulk. It runs, taking it as a 
whole, to nearly 3000 lines, of which not a few are of enormous length. 
Exodus (the best part of which is naturally the crossing of the Red 
Sea) has not quite 600. Of the others, Daniel has seldom been 
praised ; Christ and Satan, which includes a fine description of that 
very favourite subject the Harrowing of Hell (interesting as possibly 
the first to compare with Langland's, certainly the best in any like 
poetic dress), is much better. 

About Judith doctors differ much, and its authorship is sheer 
guess. We have only the end of it, but that, giving in some 350 
lines the slaughter of Holofernes and the triumph of the 
Jews, is the most interesting part of a story which has 
generally inspired both pen and pencil well, and which certainly does 
not fail to do so here. 

The Cynewulfian poem, or group of poems, which opens the 
Exeter Book, and which it is for the present the fashion to call Christ, 
certainly contains fine passages, the finest being inspired 
by that fruitful parent of mediaeval poetry the adoration ^ """ ' 
of the Cross. In Mr. Gollancz's arrangemert it has nearly 1700 
lines. 



14 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Of the four important Lives of Saints, — Andreas, Elene, Giitklac, 
Juliana, —all ascribed by some to Cynewulf, the palm may lie between 
the first and the third. Andreas is a legend of St. 
^^ slilus'^ '^^ Andrew, tellinor how he was miraculously inspired and 
miraculously helped to cross the sea in order to release 
St. Matthew from prison in '' Mermedonia "^ ; how he succeeded, and 
how he punished the violence of the heathen to himself. The stormy 
voyage, always a favourite subject witli Anglo-Saxon bards, and the 
rage of the elements on the doomed heathen city are fine passages. 
St. Guihlac has perhaps fewer lines of the '• show " variety ; but the 
description of Guthlac's conflict in his loneliness with the powers of 
evil, and that of his death, are curiously fascinating, and worth com- 
paring with St. Simeon Stylites. Elene (the English saint St. Helena, 
mother of Constantine and finder of the Cross) has admirers; Juliana 
fewer, owing to a long and rather tedious wrangle between the saint 
and a fiend who is sent to tempt her. But the recurrence of the 
name "Juliana" as a hemistich by itself, and in apposition rather 
than as direct object or subject, has almost a refrain effect, and soothes 
the ear marvellously. Indeed, though only occurring now and then, 
and on no system, it produces an effect not unlike that of the similar 
word "Oriana" in Tennyson's poem. The short Fates of the 
Apostles has little merit, but, as it is signed, some have wished to 
tack it on to the unsigned Andreas — a process slightly suggestive of 
what is said to be occasionally practised on violins. 

In so far as positive poetic beauty goes, the third subdivision, 
small as it is in bulk, has no reason to fear comparison with either 
of the others. The Dream of the Rood has, like Genesis, the adven- 
titious interest of its connection with the Ruthwell Cross 
°'^oems"^'^ inscription, but could do without it. The Rood itself 
speaks, and speaks to the purpose. The Address of the 
Soul to the Body, existing in two parts, ^ the speakers being respec- 
tively a cursed soul and a blessed one, is the earliest of a long line ; - 
and the speech of the reprobate has that peculiar grimness which 
is one of the most unquestionable gifts of Anglo-Saxon verse. The 
Phoenix, the Panther, and the Whale, adaptations of Latin verse or 
prose in the allegorical " bestiary " kind, are all fine, and the first 
has a famous and really exquisite passage, one of the few in this 
poetry to which the word can be applied, describing, after Lactantius, 
the beauties of paradise. " The Phoenix " itself, of course, is Christ ; 
as is the '• Panther," the sweet-breathed, lonely, harmless beast ; 

1 The first occurs in the Exeter and in the Vercelh Books; tlie second only in 
the latter. 

2 See the interesting collection in the Appendix of T. Wright's Poems of Walter 
Mapcs (Camden Society, 1841). 



CHAP. 11 C/EDMON, CYNEWULF, ETC. 15 

while the " Whale " (based upon the well-known Greek-Eastern story 
of sailors landing on the whale's back) is the Devil or Hell. These, 
as well as a mere fragment believed to be part of a similar poem on 
the Partridge, evidently came from some earlier Greek or Latin 
Physiologies or collection of zoological allegories ; of the Phosnix, the 
original, by or attributed to Lactantius, is, as has been said, known. 
It is quite a long poem of nearly 700 lines ; the others are much 
shorter. 

The small group of secular poems above referred to is of much 
greater interest, not at all because of any general or necessary 
superiority of profane to secular poetry — a point upon which two 
such great and dissimilar critics as Dr. Johnson and 
Mr. Matthew Arnold seem to have been led wrong by poemr 
different but equally fatal fallacies — but because, the 
poems being in all- probability original instead of pretty certainly 
translated or paraphrased, we can see much better what the real 
strength of the poets was. The Ruin, the Wander er^ the Seafarer, 
the (so-called) lVife''s Complaint, the (so-called) Husband's Message, 
make a very small bundle of verse. Even in the Grein-Wiil(c)ker 
edition, with editorial apparatus, corrected versions of text, and the 
like, they do not fill thirty pages ; yet, for these thirty, one could 
cheerfully resign almost all but the few just named passages of the 
sacred books (with perhaps a riddle or two) of the poetry mentioned 
in this chapter. For they are real documents ; it is excessively 
unlikely that they had any originals in another language, and if they 
had, we at least do not possess these originals. Even "common 
form " was not, so far as we know, furnished to them by any prede- 
cessors, as it inevitably was to homilists and hagiographers, practi- 
tioners of sacred allegory, and paraphrasers of the Scriptures. Here, 
and perhaps here only, Anglo-Saxon poetry shows what it could do 
with a commonplace — the best subjects of poetry are all common- 
places — but without a common form; and it comes out of the test 
with no small credit. 

The best of the five is in my judgment beyond all question the 
Ruin. Indeed, I do not know any other Anglo-Saxon poem which 
in conception, composition, and expression so nearly deserves the 
name of a masterpiece. As we have it, it is in a state ^, „ . 

, . , , , . . , 1 1 • i ihe Rum. 

which strangely corresponds to its title and subject — a 
broken mass of some five and thirty lines, which the painful 
ingenuity of editors has got into about five and forty, rather more 
regular in some parts, but much wounded in others. Conjecture 
thinks that it may have been originally intended for the wreck, after 
Saxon devastation, of no less a Roman colony than Bath ; there is, 
at least, nothing contrary to reason in accepting it as relating to one 



i6 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE hook i 

or other of the many stately creations of the first invaders which were 
reduced to ruin by the second. The corruption of the text makes a 
certain rendering practically impossible. But nothing can obscure 
the genuineness of its poetry, or (as it seems to me) its enormous 
superiority to the possibly contemporary Welsh lament over the 
destruction of Uriconium with which Mr. Stopford Brooke rather 
unfavourably compares it. The Welsh piece shows a further advance 
in poetical form, more cliches ready for use, more tricks of trade and 
manners of behaviour. The English shows actual poetry. Perhaps 
the deepest and noblest of all emotions, not merely personal and 
sensual, the feeling for the things that are long enough ago, finds 
expression, and worthy expression, as the poet looks on the masonry 
shattered by fate, the crumbling mortar gemmed with hoar-frost, as 
le imagines the once stately heights reduced to ruinous heaps, the 
warriors, high of heart and bloody of hand (for though Shakespeare 
never knew the Ruin, we may borrow his phrase), who sat there long 
ago, the hot baths (this is the ground for the identification with Bath) 
boiling in their lake-like cistern, the busy market-place silent, the 
merry mead-halls overwhelmed by the fiat of Destiny. He could see, 
this poet of the Ruin, and he could tell what he saw. We shall 
hardly come to any one like him for several hundred years in 
England. 

The majority of critics, I believe, assign higher rank to the 
IVando'cr and the Seafarer. The Wanderer also contains a passage 
of merit about a ruin, but is chiefly a study of " Weird " (Fate or 
Destiny), and the way in which a man is "hurled from 
Wanderer change to change unceasingly, his soul's wings never 
and furled" — as the most Saxon of nineteenth-century Eng- 
lish poets has it — his comradeships incessantly broken, 
and only .the Weird constant in its inconstancy. The idea of the 
poem is undoubtedly fine, and its lines give fair scope ; but that 
poetic imagery which is so great a part of poetry seems to me 
not so well managed as in the Ruin. The Seafarer, longer still, 
and perhaps composite, is a much more difficult poem, as may be 
guessed from the fact that the critics are not agreed whether it is a 
monological reflection upon its subject or a dialogue between an 
old sailor and a young sailor, or only colourably occupied with sea- 
faring at all, its real purport being an allegory of human life. It 
may be observed that this last interpretation, which seems to me 
much the most probable, is only to be avoided by the device, at 
once easy and violent, of supposing the close of the poem to be a 
Christian forgery, or at least addition. The chief literary merit of 
the piece is to be found in the earlier part, where the description 
of a wintry storm at sea, attributed by some to the old sailor, has 



CHAP. II C/EDMON, CYNEWULF, ETC. 17 

much of the merit aheady noted in Anglo-Saxon handlings of this 
subject. 

The remaining pair, the so-called lVife''s Complaint and Husbaiid's 
or Lover's Message, have a more personal note than the others. The 
first appears ^ to some to be the utterance, real or dramatic, of a 
woman who has been falsely accused and banished from her hus- 
band's presence. The second is an agreeable piece, in which, with 
a pleasant seventeenth-century touch, the wooden tablet bearing the 
lines of the message is made (like the " book " addressed by later 
singers) itself to carry the tale to the beloved (or at least addressed) 
one. Neither is long, but both have an unpretentious and sincere 
feeling, if not exactly passion, and both stand interestingly at the 
head of a class of similar j^oems, in which English has since been 
richer than all other languages put together. They date too from a 
period long antecedent to that of either troubadour or minnesinger. 

The arrest of Anglo-Saxon poetry by the Danish fury seems to 
have been very nearly total. The verse, other than mere sacred 
paraphrases, which we have of a later date than Alfred is but scanty 
even in total bulk, and only four pieces of it can be said to have much 
literary attraction, though, curiously enough, two of these are much 
better known than any of the older and better work. These are the 
short poem inserted in the Chronicle Qvide ififra), on the triumph of 
Athelstan at Brunanburgh over the Scots and Danes, and the very late, 
gloomy, but fine Grave Poem familiar to almost every Englishman 
who cares for poetry, with its beginning, " For thee was a house 
built.""' In this latter the idea and the grim, direct uncompromis- 
ing delivery of it are the chief merits. The Bmnanburgh poem, 
though a spirited war-song, perhaps attracted more attention by its 
setting of the stock Anglo-Saxon reference to the raven, eagle, and 
wolf, " that grey beast the wolf of the weald," as spoilers of the dead, 
than would have been the case if the earlier examples from Beowulf 
and the Finnsburg poem downwards had been known. 

Of the two remaining pieces, one has the attraction of subject, the 
other that of form. The Battle of Maldon or the Death of Byrhtnoth 
has a less happy subject (a defeat not a victory) than the Brunanburgh 
piece, but it is more genuine, contemporary, and fresh. The pro- 

1 It ought perhaps to be said that the usual interpretations of these pieces are 
more than half guesswork. There is really nothing in what Tliorpe more pru- 
dently calls The Exile's Complaint to identify the speaker as a wife, nor any- 
thing in the other piece (his as prudently named Fraf^mcnt) to point to a 
husband or even lover. 

2 Text in Guest, Englishc Rhythms, 2nd ed. p. 369, or in Thorpe's Aiialecta, 
ed. 1868, p. 153. Longfellow translated it not long, I think, after Conybeare first 
made it known. It is thouglit to be as late as the tweiftii century, and shows signs 
ai metrical influence in its rhythm. 



l8 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i 

duction known as the Rhyming Poe>n, or Conybeare's Rhyming 
Poem, is found in the Exeter Book. This, though far inferior in 
intrinsic and poetical interest, has great historical importance. It is 
probably a Biblical paraphrase, like so many others, and as it is in 
the Exeter Book, it must be as old at least as the tenth century, or 
the very earliest eleventh. Now, not merely at that time, but much 
later, Anglo-Saxon was rebel to rhyme ; ^ even two hundred years after, 
in Layamon, the appearances of that instmment are but occasional 
and very rudimentary. In the Rhyming Poem, however, though there 
is still alliteration, and the general structure of the lines is not very 
different from the staple of Anglo-Saxon verse, they are arranged in 
couplets, or sometimes even larger groups, not merely tipped with end 
rhymes, but endowed with leonine or middle rhymes as well. Some- 
times the rhyme is not much more than assonance, but oftener it is 
full rhyme, and not seldom it adopts the kind which later English 
poetry discourages, though it is allowed in other languages, the actual 
repetition of the same complete words or group of letters, onivrah, 
onwrah, hiwum, hiwum, etc. Once there is a batch of seven lines 
with the same rhyme — ade, varied a little by ide and ede — in the 
middle and at the end of each ; in another place one of five lines 
similarly equipped with words in iteth; and sometimes the couplet 
shrinks to a single line with leonine adjustment. Of course this is 
inartistic and overdone : the poet is thinking so much of his new toy 
of rhyme that he has not much time to think of his poetry. But he 
is ahead of his fellows by two centuries if not by three, and that is 
something and much.^ 

1 There were, however, other outbreaks, or rather ««breaks of it. See espe- 
cially the remarkable verse-fragment in the Chronicle (A. 1036, edited in Grein- 
Wul(c)ker, i. 384-85), describing Godwin's outrages on the "guiltless etheling" 
Alfred and his men. 

2 This tour deforce, which is only partially intelligible, and in which there 
is good reason to suppose the invention of words for the purpose, has been thought 
to be imitated from Icelandic. A few things of little literary interest — para- 
phrases of the Psalms, a dialogue of So/omon and Satiiruiis, a piece on Dooms- 
day, etc. — complete the tale of Anglo-Saxon poetry. 



CHAPTER III 



ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 



The works of King Alfred — The Boethius — The Orosius — The Bede — The 
Pastoral Care — T\\& Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — Elfric — Wulfstan 

The prose division of Anglo-Saxon literature is of less literary interest 
than the verse ; but it is more abundant in quantity, and it is not 
separated from the later developments of the language by any such 
sharp gulf as that which cuts off the prosody and rhythm of Anglo- 
Saxon from the prosody and rhythm of English. We may, indeed, 
nhsPTve in it th ^t curiou$ . ^vet. -ivvhen considered, very far from unin- 
telligible combination of earliness ancl immaturity! rapid development 
up to a certain point and inability to go beyontl that point, which 
meet us in the poetry ; but there is not the bar to any further devel- 
opment which existed in t hatT case.y tnC«HQb*r\-^ 

In all languages poetry as literature comes before prose, the 
immortal jest of Moliere owing its piquancy to exactly this, that 
though prose is more obviously natural to man in conversation, he 
never, till after considerable experience, seems to understand that it is 
fit to be made a medium of recorded thought or formal writing. But 
it would appear that it was, in Anglo-Saxon, pretty early. Professor 
Earle speaks ^ of "' obscure but well-evidenced remains of the fifth and 
sixth centuries," but as so enthusiastic an authority does not himself 
dwell much on these, or on the laws of Ina attributed to the seventh, 
we may afford to pass them over. It is in the eighth century that 
Mr. Earle claims something like literary competency for the earliest 
English prose, and the examples which he chooses are a deed of 
remission of port dues by King Ethelbald of Mercia, and the some- 
wliat famous passage of the Saxon Chronicle relating the death of 
King Cynewulf {t!ot the poet), the first of these dating a little before 
and the second a little after the very middle of the eighth century 
itself. With the later passage, too, Mr. Sweet begins the prose speci- 

1 English Prose, London, 1890, p. 370. 
19 



20 rRELIMINyVRIliS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i 

mens in his Anglo-Saxon Reader, ^ and it seems to be generally allowed 
the position of the earliest distinctly spirited piece of prose literary 
composition in the language. 

To such spirit, or, in other words, to the motive power of style, 
laws, title-deeds, and similar documents can, in the very nature of 
the case, seldom lay claim. It would, in fact, be decidedly out of 
place in them, and the bare enumerations, .specifications, connnon 
forms of legal and other speech, etc., which they contain could be of 
little illustrative use, even if they were not, as in most cases they may 
be suspected to be, pretty closely copied from Latin originals. But 
the story of the attack made by the atheling Cyneheard on the King 
Cynewulf, when the latter had impmdently left most of his guard 
behind while visiting a lady-love, gives better opportunities. The 
incident is told at no great length, and without much personal char- 
acterisation, except in the notable answer of tlie thanes to Cyne- 
heard's offers of bribes and arguments from kinsliip, that "no kinsman 
was dearer to them than their lord, and they never would follow 
his bane." Except that the piece seems contemporary, one woufd 
imagine a rough prose "unrhyming" of some ballad or romance. 
But if we are to consider the thing as prose merely, it may give -us 
some pause to find that of the two authorities above cited, Mr. Swe^, 
though giving it the high distinction of being " by far the oldest 
historical prose in any Teutonic language," tliinks the style "of \\rt 
rudest character . . . abrupt, disconnected, obscure, and full of 
anacolutha," while Professor Earle discerns, and thinks that every 
one must discern, the evidence hi " a -trterary tradition already of 
mature standing," and "a syntax not more rugged than that of 
Thucydides. " Thucydides has, of course, a sort of traditional 
repute for crabbed syntax, so that the eulogy is, after all, not 
unqualified. 

By the next century (the ninth), however, there is no doubt about 
the plentiful production and the at least relative accomplishment of 
Anglo-Saxon prose. Of the three writers of it who alone may be 
said to have a personal reputation, King Alfred, Elfric, and Archbishop 
Wulfstan, the first belongs to this century, the last third of which was 
covered by his glorious and beneficent reign. The Saxon Chronicle, 
in its continuous and fairly accomplished shape, may be a little older 
than Alfred himself, though it is thought to have taken final form 
under him. The King and the Chronicle will at any rate well deserve 
separate and independent notice. 

Alfred's works are, with the exception of some original insertion.s, 
wholly translation — indeed, as we have seen with the verse, so we 

1 Oxford, 7th ed. 1894. 



ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 



shall see with the prose, and to an even larger extent, that the merit of 
originality in matter is about the last that Anglo-Saxon as a literature 
can claim. But in the special circumstances this makes 
far more for the King's honour than for his dishonour. King AUVcd. 
His literary work was inspired not by any desire of fame, 
nor by any need of satisfying a peremptory personal craving to write, 
but wholly and solely by the wish to benefit his people, to do some- 
thing that might help England out of the slough of barbarism into 
which she had been plunged by the Danish ravages and the eftbrts 
necessary to check them. To this end it would have l^een not 
merely presumptuous, but, in the circumstances and at the time, posi- 
tively silly to have attempted original composition, when there was 
plenty of good Latin work lying ready to hand. From this Alfred 
selected a book in what may be called general practical science, the 
History and Geography of Orosius ; one in domestic history, the 
unrivalled Ecclesiastical History of Bedc ; the most popular ethi- 
cal and philosophical treatise of the Dark Ages, the Consolation of 
Boethius ; and an ecclesiastical book, the Cnra PastoralisL. of Pope 
Gregory. The first of these is not precisely a work of genius or one 
of much authority, but it was a poi^ular manual of its day ; the second 
and third could hardly have been bettered for the purpose, inasmuch as 
they were the work of two men who represented the best character 
and ablest intellect of the age immediately preceding, and whose 
thought, style, and tone were in complete harmony with the spirit of 
the actual age ; the fourth was a respectable book, well suited for the 
purpose, and having some special claim on the attention of English- 
men. 

The most interesting of the four,i in so far as actual matter goes, 
IS the Orosius, because of the additions which Alfred made from in- 
formation supi^lied to himself; but the most interesting as literature 
is unquestionably the Boethius. There are many greater 
books in the literature of the world than the De Con- '^^'^ ^'"'^"'"'■ 
solationc ; but there are few that have had a more interesting literary 
history, and still fewer that seem to have, with such strange prescience, 
gauged the literary and philosophical requirements not merely of their 
own time but of times that were to follow for almost a millennium. 
One of the first documents in English prose is this translation of 
King Alfred's ; probably the very first document in the earliest 
development of the Romance tongues, Provenqal, is the verse-para- 
phrase which gives us the majestic if slightly monotonous harmony of 

1 The Boethius and the Orosius are easily obtainable in Anglo-Saxon (old- 
printed) and English, in Bohn's "Antiquarian Library." The E.E.T.S. has 
given critical editions of the Orosius and the Bede and the Pastoral Care. A 
version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies is probably also Alfred's. 



22 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i 

the langue d''oc a century or two after Alfred. When Anglo-Saxon 
and the Middle language have at length given place to complete 
English, the most accomplished piece of prose that the all-accom- 
plished muse of Chaucer admits among his greater verse is again a 
translation of Boethius ; and yet another translation, this time partial, 
is attributed to Queen Elizabeth, at the very time when the far-off 
heralding of Alfred, the directer promises of Chaucer, were about to 
be fulfilled. 

As " the last of the Romans " is not now in every one's hands, it 
may not be superfluous or impertinent to say that Anicius Manlius 
Severinus Boethius, as his barbarically assorted travesty of the old 
Roman nomenclature went, was born somewhere about the beginning 
of the last quarter of the fifth century. He is said to have studied 
under Proclus at Athens, which is possible, but barely possible, if the 
death of Proclus be taken at the ordinary date of 485. He attained 
distinction at Rome, and having been consul in 510, attracted the 
notice of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, and was for some time in favour 
with him. But being accused of fomenting or conniving at an Italian 
conspiracy against Gothic rule, he was imprisoned at Ticinum, and 
brutally put to death (clubbed, it is said) in or about 524-525. The 
De Cousolatwne Pliilosophiae is supposed to have been written in prison. 
It was not his only contribution to mediaeval knowledge, for he 
e.xercised an immense influence on scholastic logic by his commentaries 
on Aristotle and Porphyry and Cicero ; but it was perhaps his most 
popular and non-technical. It consists of a medley of dialogue be- 
tween Wisdom and the author, interspersed with metrical insertions. 
Two versions of Alfred's translation exist, in one of which the metrical 
portions are rendered into prose, while in the other they are versified. 
Although there is difference of opinion on the subject, there does 
not seem to be any insuperable difficulty in admitting both forms as 
authentic, though very likely the King had help from others. If the 
"metres" in their Anglo-Saxon form are really his, they are of the 
greatest interest to the literary historian, because they show that at 
this time Anglo-Saxon was proof against the temptations of rhyme, 
classical metre, and the like, to which in its enfeebled Early Middle 
English or " Semi-Saxon " stage it afterwards succumbed. The trans- 
lation is by no means slavishly executed ; indeed, the reproach of 
want of originaHty against Anglo-Saxon generally is largely mitigated 
by the fact that the translations are much more paraphrases with 
interpolations ad lib. than simply faithful versions. It is quite possible 
that deficient scholarship may to some extent account for this freci 
dom, but it would be as uncritical as it would be illiberal to take this 
as the sole, even as the chief, reason. Alfred's moral purpose in 
the Boethius, like his scientific and practical purpose in the Orostus, 



CHAP. Ill ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 23 

induced him and authorised him not merely to rearrange, but to add 
gloss and comment here and there. It is a pity that, in the edition 
of the Boethius most accessible, a rhymed and sophisticated English- 
ing by the late Mr. Martin Tupper takes the place of the rendering 
into rhythmical prose which alone can give any proper equivalent for 
Anglo-Saxon verse in modern English. 

The Orosiiis, it has been said, has, or rather would have, nothing 
like the intrinsic interest of the Boethius, were it not for the insertions, 
which in the Boethius itself have chiefly the interest of curiosity. 
Paulus Orosius was a Spanish priest, who was a disciple 
of St. Augustine's in the second decade of the fifth 
century, an antagonist of Pelagius, and a friend of St. Jerome. He 
wrote, as befitted an Anti-Pelagian, a book about free-will, and other 
matters ; but his name has been chiefly preserved by the work which 
Alfred translated, the Historia adversns Faganos, one of the numerous 
summaries of universal history which the decline of classical times 
and the Dark Ages saw, but diff"erentiated by a special intention to 
refute the Pagan argument that the decline and fall of the Roman 
Empire were due to the neglect of the ancient deities. It is, for the 
most part, a mere compilation from previous compilations, and in no 
part a work of any literary merit ; but like all books of the kind, not 
hopelessly incompetent, it has" the advantage of keeping the general 
course of history before the reader. It would, however, be folly to 
suppose that Alfred had any philosophical consideration of this kind 
in view when he chose the book. It was an orthodox and popular 
manual, it gave opportunities for insertions of a kind specially inter- 
esting to himself and specially useful to his people, and he took it 
and altered it accordingly, displaying, as in the Boethius, no great 
reverence towards the text, but in the nature of the case making 
somewhat smaller alterations in arrangement, and rather fewer addi- 
tions of reflection and suggestion, though in parts a good deal more 
reduction to the character of an epitome. 

The interesting parts, to us, are the insertions in the earlier 
chapters on the geography of Northern Europe, beginning " Othere 
told his Lord King Alfred," and " VVulfstan said," the.^e being 
either known, or reasonably taken to be, reports of voyages either dis- 
tinctly made under the King's commission, or at any rate indicating 
his desire for the best and latest direct information. Othere tells of 
a voyage to Lapland and the White Sea; Wulfstan of an explora- 
tion of the Baltic, and especially of the Esthonians, the folk about 
the mouth of the Vistula. It should be observed that both the 
Boethius and the Orosius are abundantly furnished with vernacular 
"contents" to facilitate their reading and understanding by the 
people. 



24 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE hook i 



Alfred's translation of Bede's History has yet again a different 

kind of interest ; and to us it is especially welcome because it brings 

the Venerable one within the compass of a history of 

The I>€u€ 

EngUsh literature. Invaluable as Bede in his Latin dress 
is to the historian proper, he would have been dearer to the literary 
historian if he had lived a little later, so that he might have been 
tempted to write in the- vernacular. That he could have done so 
there can be no doubt, for he was, as the famous and charming 
description of his death by his reader Cuthbert says, "learned in our 
poetry." and on his death-bed summed up the situation — the vanity 
of all knowledge but such as will guide a man's soul right at the last 
— in a memorable stave of five Anglo-Saxon verses. But in his 
day — he was born in 673, entered the monastery of Wearmouth at 
seven years old, was soon transferred to that of Jarrow, and lived his 
whole life there, dying in 735 — it was more important to digest 
learning, both sacred and profane, in Latin for popular consumption, 
and this Bede did. Even as it is, the interesting story of Casdmon 
referred to above may be said to be the beginning of English literary 
history, and here Alfred's translation (or another's if it was not his) is 
particularly important, because, while Bede's account is in Latin, it has 
preserved to us what may possibly be the very words of Ca^dnion's 
actual inspiration. 

At any rate, the translation of Bede shows us that Alfred was 
not so anxious merely to instruct his people in general and foreign 
learning that he wished to divert their attention from " things of 
England " ; and it is impossible not to take it in conjunction with the 
great enterprise of the Saxon Chronicle, of which, as an aspirant 
to learning once remarked in an examination (probably taking the 
CJironicle for a daily paper), '' Alfred was editor." 

The fourth book has, at the present day, the least interest for us 

in itself. Gregory's Regit la or Ciira Pastoralis, as far as its intrinsic 

claims are concerned, must be studied in the original ; and, more- 

over, Alfred, either out of respect or otherwise, has 

Care. here translated much more exactly than in the other 
cases. But fortunately he prefixed an original introduc- 
tion, and this introduction contains a constantly quoted and extremely 
important account of the state to which polite learning in England, 
in the middle of the ninth century, had been reduced by the Danish 
invasions. " There was a time," quoth Alfred, " when people came to 
this island for instruction, now we must get it from abroad if we want 
it." " There were," adds tlie King, '■' very few on this side Humber 
wlio could so much as translate the Cluirch Service or an ordinary Latin 
letter into English [for " Englisc" has taken its place once for all 
as the general name of the tongue], and not many on the other side" 



ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 25 



(there being still apparently remnants of the old Northumbrian cul- 
ture). There was not, he ends, with a gentle and more than pardon- 
able boast, one such south of Thames, when he himself took the 
kingdom. It has been well pointed out that though this decay of 
culture may have been lamentable in itself, yet it was fortunate in a 
way for English, inasmuch as it stimulated translation, and so gave 
practice in the vernacular, instead of tempting men, as Bede had 
been tempted, simply to abstract and compile in Latin itself, and 
even when they wrote original work, to write it in Latin. The trans- 
lations may not be of first-rate literary importance, but they are at 
any rate better than the Latin summaries ; and precious as the 
Historia Ecclesiastica is, it would have been ten times more precious 
had it been in English, if only because the actual original text of 
Caedmon could then have been given. 

Other works of Alfred are spoken of — especially a Commonplace- 
book or book of Table-talk — which should have been interesting; but 
they have not survived. The so-called Fnn>erbs of Alfred, in Middle 
English, to which we shall come in due time, have value, and may 
to some extent represent work of the King's, but they can hardly 
be accepted even as a direct modernised version thereof. It is, how- 
ever, at least possible that the Chronicle itself in part represents 
his work, as it certainly represents his influence, and it 

, r 1 . r The Auglo- 

is m any case by lar the most nnportant monument 01 Saxoti 
Anglo-Saxon prose, carrying us, with at least only par- Chronicle. 
tially broken sweep, in contemporary vernacular history from the 
middle of the eighth century to the middle of the twelfth, preserving 
amid drier annals some exceedingly interesting fragments of composi- 
tion of the more original kind, both in prose and verse, manifesting 
an ability to manage the subject which was only much later shown 
in other vernacular languages, and bridging for us, with a thin but 
distinct streak of union, the gulf between the decadence or ruin of 
Anglo-Saxon even before the Conquest and the rise of English proper 
more than a century subsequent to it. 

Like other works of the kind, and indeed necessarily, the Chronicle'^ 
was the work of monkish labour — one of those things by which the 
lazy monks, the drones of th e Dark Age s, earned the polite and 
TnteUigent contempt ot the philosophers of the eighteenth centur}-^ 
And it followed from ^this that it should not present a single text, 
or even sequence of texts, but should exist in more versions than 
one, as the work was carried on at different centres. The first of 
these centres was, as might have been expected, Winchester, for the 
historical use of English prose had not been discovered in the palmy 

1 The Oironicle was printed as early as 1643, and has been repeatedly re- 
printed, re-edited, and translated since. 



26 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book 

days of Northumbrian literature, and Winchester was by far the most 
important place in Wessex, when the balance of power had bet- 
definitely shifted thither. The Winchester Chronicle is vigorous 
and full for the days of Alfred himself and Edward the Elder, but 
becomes rather meagre for the second and third quarters of the tenth 
century. It makes up for this, however, by inserting verse, the most 
important piece by far being the already referred to poem celebratin' 
the battle of Brunanburgh. By the end of the century the traditioii 
of chronicling seems to have died out in the Hampshire capital, and 
to have shifted to the metropolitan city of Canterbury, to Worcester 
(the main bulwark of England against the South Welsh border, and 
far from Danish reach), and to the rich and important abbey of 
Abingdon. The Winchester series extended a little beyond the Con- 
quest, but the latest batch of English chronicle comes not from here 
but from Peterborough, in the neighbourhood of which the national, 
as opposed to the Norman, spirit was always strong. One of the 
very best known passages of the whole — the constantly quoted 
description of the sufferings of the country under Stephen's robber- 
barons and in their castles — comes from this last batch, and indeed 
represents the final utterance of English historical writing for the time. 
It was stifled by the brilliant, but in the history of English literature 
irrelevant and interpolated, outbursts of Latin chronicle-writing which 
the middle of the twelfth century saw, and which only gave place later 
to the verse of Robert of Gloucester, and later still to the now fully 
English prose of Trevisa. 

It would be more than a little unreasonable to expect that such 
a conglomerate, or batch of conglomerates, as the Saxon Chronicle 
should present any uniform literary features. The variations of hour 
and man make that quite impossible. At first, and indeed at intervals 
throughout, we get the barest annals, sometimes mere obituaries or 
calendars of translations, consecrations, cpronations, and the like, 
only interrupted occasionally by less jejune accounts of the founding 
of a monastery, of such events as the assassination of Cynewulf at his 
leman's house, etc., where accident, personal interest, the chance 
possession of a poem or a deed, filled the writer's pen. Then, again, 
the wars of Ethelred and Alfred and Edward against the Danes 
inspire something like a regular history. The Peterborough part, as 
might be expected from its later date, has, in"so far as we possess it, 
still more of this irregularity. 

The two remaining known and distinctive writers of Anglo-Saxon 
prose come under the disqualification which attaches from the purely 
literary point of view to religious writers, in all cases but those of a 
very few periods and a few individuals outside them — the disquali- 
fication not at all that they are religious, but that they are second- 



ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 



27 



jhand. But the first of them, Elfric, is undoubtedly the greatest prose 
,iifriter in the language. The influence and example of King Alfred, 
if it had not founded English prose, had at least given a 
great impetus to the founding of it, and this impetus was 
followed up throughout the tenth century, which has even, by some 
jenthusiasts, been hailed as one of the great prose periods of the 
•(^hole English language in its widest sense. Essential importance 
Hs assigned to the work and teaching of Ethel wold, Bishop of Win- 
chester, a pupil of Dunstan's, in the middle part of the century, not 
much of whose own writing is preserved, but who is thought to 
have had a wide influence, the earliest and extensive proof of 
which is the collection of Anglo-Saxon sermons, called the Blicklins, 
Homilies -j"^ while the greatest and most lasting is the work of Elfric. 
which in parts spreads beyond merely ecclesiastical or theological 
limits. Elfric,- who was a pupil of Ethelwold, as Ethelwold had 
been of Dunstan, began to write in the last decade of the tenth cen- 
tury, and first executed a large set (some eighty) of Catholic Homilies, 
which he followed up later with a series of homiletic Lives of the 
Saints in an alliterative rhythm, distinct from prose, but not quite 
reaching the limits even of Anglo-Saxon verse. His other writings 
were numerous, and include an interesting little set of books for the 
instruction of Englishmen in Latin — a grammar, a glossary, and an 
agreeable, interlined, Latin-English colloquy, which is the earliest 
example of the Hamiltonian-Ollenclorfian method as applied to Eng- 
lish. Elfric, of whose life not much is known, though he became 
abbot of Ensham near Oxford, and whose death-year is uncertain, 
is accused by some of having been rather too fond of alliteration 
even in his undoubtedly prose work, which includes translations of 
parts of the Bible. But his style is distinctly clear, flowing, and 
vigorous, and though only the enthusiasm above referred to could 
possibly see in it a medium suited for general literary exercises, it 
probably carried Anglo-Saxon as far in that direction as the immature 
character of the language itself permitted. 

Elfric's life considerably overlapped that of the third writer 
referred to, Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, at whose 
consecration in 1014 Elfric himself wrote one of his 
tractate-sermons by command. Wulfstan. who was for many years 
Archbishop of York, and during part of the time Bishop of Worcester 

1 Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S., 1874, sq. The exact date assigned is 971. 

2 To be distinguished from an archbishop of the same name with whom he 
was long confused, and from his own pupil, Elfric Bata, who re-edited the 
Colloquy. An Elfric Society was formed more than fifty years ago to publish him ; 
and its work has been resumed by the E.E.T.S. There is a pretty full selection 
in Thorpe's Analecta. 



28 TRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE took i 

also,^ has left over fifty homilies,- and a letter to the English people, 
or those of the province of Yorlc, which has interest. It is, however, 
quite impossible to grant the title of "fine prose" which Professor 
Earle postulates, either to his or to Elfric's. much more to the 
passage from another, to which the Professor especially refers, a 
figurative description of the Lord's Prayer:^ "And his thought is 
more springing and swifter than twelve thousand holy ghosts, though 
each and every ghost have sundrily twelve feather-coats, and every 
several feather-coat have twelve winds, and every several wind 
twelve victoriousnesses sundrily." The conceit is vigorous and pleas- 
ing, and the compounding power of the language, which it has left 
to its heir, is observable in sigefcestniss, " victoriousness." But the 
arrangement and construction are of the very simplest kind, clauses 
of the same model being merely agglomerated. In Wulfstan we 
find more attempt at periodic prose than here ; but the periods are 
inartistically arranged, and that fault which was later to mar so much 
seventeenth-century prose, the inability to resist the temptation of 
adding and piling up epexegetic clauses, already appears.* 

1 Distinguish again from the much later Bishop Wulfstan under the Con- 
queror. 

2 Ed. A. Napier, 1883. 

3 Op. cit. p. 382. The piece is from a prose form of the Solomon and Saturn 
dialogue. 

4 The list of A.S. prose is, of course, by no means exhausted in the examples 
given. There are laws, " leechdoms," short tales, Biblical translations, etc. The 
most interesting are, for their connection with later and romantic literature, the 
story of Apollonius of Tyre (the original of Pericles), ed. Thorpe, 1834; a version 
of the episode of Alexander and Dindimus, and the wonders of Ind, from the 
great legend history of Alexander (ed. Cockayne in his Narraliiinciilae) ; and for 
its matter. Bishop Werfrith's translation (with a Preface by King Alfred) of the 
Dialogues of St. Gregory. If there is much in them like the plea of the devil by 
whom a nun was possessed (see Professor Earle, Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 197), 
"Ic saet me on anum laehtrice, tha com heo and bat me!" ("I sat me on a 
lettuce, then came she and bit [ate] me ! ") the sooner these dialogues, which are 
still unedited, become accessible the better. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE DECADENCE OF ANGLO-SAXON 



It was long, and very naturally, a popular opinion that the Norman 
Conquest sufficiently accounted for, and directly caused, the practical 
disappearance of Anglo-Saxon literature. But the revived study of 
that literature itself, though it may in some cases have produced 
rather an exaggerated estimate of its intrinsic interest and merits, 
helped, and was helped by, the previous study of political historians 
to correct this delusion. Just as it was seen that the Norman Con- 
quest, mighty as were its effects, was no absolute political cataclysm 
sweeping away the first England and replacing it with something else, 
to the same extent and in the same manner as those in which the 
Saxon Conquest had swept away Roman Britain, so it was discerned 
that the Conquest only helped and turned to good a process in lan- 
guage which had been independently begun, which was going on 
rapidly, and which, but for the Conquest itself, might have had more 
disastrous results. 

In other words, it has now for some time been recognised that 
Anglo-Saxon, as a literary language, was, if not slowly dying, at any 
rate slowly passing into some other form, long before William landed 
at Pevensey. It is impossible to mistake the significance of the 
facts that it had produced at that date no poetry that can be called 
great, and little of any kind, for some two hundred and fifty years ; 
that its prose, though vigorously started under the highest auspices, 
and though brought to some measure of relative perfection by men 
like Elfric and Wulfstan, was itself failing, and had never, except in 
the form of generally meagre chronicle, produced any original non- 
sacred literature. There must have been something wrong, some 
want, some coldness in the literary constitution, to account for 
this. A language by weakness, by accident, by ill luck, may never 
produce literature at all. But if it produces things like the Ruin and 
the Pha'iiix, like the best parts of the poems attributed to Caedmon, 
and those thought to be signed by Cynewulf, and then does nothing 

29 



30 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i 

more — if it practically limits its prose energies to homilies and para- 
phrases and strictly business jottings, then undoubtedly it wants a 
change. 

In the second place, it is admitted that the language itself was 
showing signs of a complete "break of voice," of an important 
biological alteration. Its inflections were getting loosened and 
weakened, whether from inherent old age or from the attraction and 
competition of the rival inflections of French and Latin must be 
matter of conjecture. But it appears that a similar change was taking 
place in its Continental kin. That its warring dialects had very much 
to do with this may be doubted. The West Saxon had after the down- 
fall of Northumbria taken a distinct lead ; and it does not seem that at 
any time the dialectic variations constituted an insuperable bar between 
Englishman and Englishman. But they must have helped a little, 
though they no doubt did less than the constant and age-long effect 
of the practically bilingual education of every man who aimed at 
learning in Latin as well as in English, and than, latterly, the estab- 
lishment of French as a second, if not a first, court language in the 
Confessor's Palace. The fact, however, seems to be beyond dispute, 
and the inevitable literary consequence of the fact still more so. 
You cannot write literature in a language which is not sure of itself, 
which is crumbling day by day. To which we may add that the 
signs of senescence and degradation are as evident in prosody as in 
the other parts of grammar proper. We have, as has been said, very 
little late Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the dates of what we have are 
extremely uncertain. But we can be nearly sure that in all of it 
strict alliteration was breaking down, rhyme was breaking in, and 
that for a time the contemptuous term absurdly applied to the 
true English prosody which emerged later, that of a " jumble," 
miglit have been applied without much injustice. Our ancestors at 
this time had lost grasp of their own rhythm and not learned metre ; 
just as they were getting to mumble Anglo-Saxon, and had not 
learned to speak English. The old order was changing in every 
way, but it was some time before the new could get into regular 
form. 

This is the rational and sufficient, the only rational and sufficient, 
explanation of the whole matter, that the time had come for 
Anglo-Saxon to die, that it died, and that it would have had to die if 
Harold had been as victorious at Senlac as at Stamford Bridge, 
though probably the result would have been less fortunate for 
England, as it would pretty certainly have been quite infinitely less 
fortunate for France. For it must never be forgotten — though it 
would be hardly an exaggeration to say that it has seldom been 
remembered — that France had little or no literature to give England, 



ciiAi'. IV THE DECADENCE OF ANGLO-SAXON 31 

and that what she had (a chanson de gcste or two, and some verse 
saint-lives rather less formless than England's own) were things of 
little importance and less influence. It is an amiable but entirely 
unhistorical imagination to suggest that French literature was brought 
to England by the Conquest. There was little or none to bring; 
and what arose later would have been equally brought by the 
increasing popularity of the French language and its vigour in face 
of Anglo-Saxon decay. Nay more, some of the greatest things in 
Old French were written under English influence, in districts which, 
though not English in soil, were under English rule, on subjects which 
were supplied by England from Teutonic as well as from Celtic 
stores. It is not insignificant that in the oldest French literature, the 
Chansons, " Normans " are spoken of with as much dislike, and some- 
times in the same terms, as the perfidious Englishman of a later date 
has enjoyed. It is of even more significance that, although the 
original te.xts of the great Arthurian legend were, no doubt, all written 
in the French language, they are written on a " British matter," and 
partly by Englishmen. We had lost the key of our word-hoard : 
we had indeed never possessed any, had simply been fumbling for 
one, in regard to the largest and richest part of it. Latin and French, 
Latin even more than French, helped us at last to forge the proper 
keys of language, of style, and best of all, of prosody. But they did 
not put the treasure there, they only helped us to find it and use it. 



INTERCHAPTER I 

To the short, but it is hoped not absoKitely insufficient, account of 
Anglo-Saxon Hterature contained in the foregoing Book, there will 
now, according to the system explained in the preface, be subjoined a 
general summary of its accomplishments and character, disengaged 
from the previously necessary survey of individual facts. 

We have seen that in its comparatively scanty bulk, and under 
the disadvantages of a political history not indeed short in time but 
very unsettled, and but scantily equipped and supplied by civilisation, 
Anglo-Saxon succeeded in producing work both in prose and verse 
which has not only intrinsic merit and interest, which has not only 
the additional historic claim of being the ancestor of one of the 
greatest literatures of the world, but which has the further attraction, 
also historic, but surely not negligible, of being for its time unique, or 
having only Icelandic for a doubtful competitor. Icelandic itself 
was probably some two centuries behind Anglo-Saxon in the use of 
vernacular prose. 

But it is exceedingly important to take stock of the exact literary 
value of the accomplishments of this language both in themselves and 
in relation to its great descendant. One thing that Anglo-Saxon 
did is fortunately beyond all dispute. It "unlocked the word- 
hoard " — a word-hoard still very much in the rough, and with some 
disadvantages which will be considered more specially below. Like 
some metals, it needed blending with others before it became 
thoroughlv useful. But in native strength, in backbone, in the 
power of standing rough usage and being the better for it, it had 
perhaps no superiors, and it possessed certain valuable, or rather 
invaluable, qualities. In particular, it had that gift which some lan- 
guages almost wholly lack, of forming compounds freely. Ciedmon's 
famous heolster-sceado, kolsier-s/iadcnu, '' cover or sheath of dark- 
ness," gives at the second opening of the literature a measure of 
its capacities in this way, and they can hardly be exaggerated. A 
language that cannot combine thus, or can do it only with difficulty, 
is a poor thin thing, the worst stuff possible for poetry, and fit 

32 



INTERCHAPTER I 33 



only for decent, perhaps elegant, but uninspired and uninspiring 
prose. 

In prose itself, however, Anglo-Saxon did not do very much, and 
it could hardly be expected to do very much. It had not the subjects ; 
its writers had not the demand ; and if by any chance any man had 
both subject and demand, there was the fatal mistress Latin tempting 
him away from the homely English wife. For almost every man of 
letters was an ecclesiastic, and almost every man of letters, ecclesiastic 
or not, looked to the public not merely of his own burg or realm, but of 
Latin Christendom, which had its own universal tongue. Moreover, 
the fully-inflected condition of Anglo-Saxon has to be taken account 
of, and its dialects, and above all the extreme insecurity and 
instability of political and social conditions at the time. War and 
ruin may sometimes — they do not by any means always — repay in 
song what they have exacted in suffering ; but prose as a rule 
requires prosperity, business, leisure for its cultivation. However 
this may be, it is certain that, as literature, the achievement of Anglo- 
Saxon in prose is very much less than its achievement in verse, 
though there may be a less abrupt separation between this achievement 
and what follows in the same medium. 

In poetry it did more, and there are few points of more import- 
ance for the general study and comprehension of English literature 
as a whole than a comprehension of the general poetical equipment 
and accomplishment of Anglo-Saxon. And as estimates of these 
points have too often varied between the extremes of passionate and 
partisan appreciation on the one hand, and complete ignoring or 
unfair, perhaps sometimes ill-informed, depreciation on the other, 
such a general view has not been very easy to obtain. Yet there is 
no real difficulty in taking it. 

Anglo-Saxon poetry, then, as we see it in the sufficient if not very 
plentiful remains of its best period before the end of the eighth 
century, displays merits of what we may call poetical intention con- 
siderably surpassing those shown by most literatures in their early 
stages, and at least equal to those which some literatures have shown 
at stages far more advanced. It has passion — not so much in the 
conventional and limited sense of the passion of love, with which it 
deals very little, as in the general sense of subjective intensity — of 
evidence in song that the poet has felt, seen, thought, or at least 
wondered, with a deep and genuine movement. And much of this 
action of thought and feeling is directed to natural objects, in a 
fashion again very rare in most literatures, and almost entirely absent 
from some. Yet again, though the resources of form, of art at the 
poet's command are undeniably scanty and rude, yet, such as they are, 
they are used with care and skill. In other words, and this is no 



34 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book 

mean praise, the Anglo-Saxon poet at his best, and that pretty 
frequently, has no mean portion of the poetic spirit, and has a just 
reverence for what he knows of the poetic art. In the first respect 
the author oi Beoivulfls at least not less richly and variously endowed 
than even the author of the Chanson de Roland ; in the second, the 
author of the Phcenix is very far ahead of the author of the Poema 
del Cid. 

But valuable, or rather invaluable, as are these equipments, every 
Anglo-Saxon poet from first to last during the Anglo-Saxon period 
proper sutlers from two drawbacks which hamper him cruelly — 
monotony of subject and clumsiness of form. In both respects his 
limitations are hardly even in the smallest degree a reproach to him. 
When we remember that, so far as is known, absolutely no great 
literature except Greek has ever been produced without other pattern 
literatures before it ; when we remember what was the comparative 
civilization of England up to the eighth century after Christ, and of 
Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ ; when we remem- 
ber further that Anglo-Saxon culture never had so much as a single 
century of quiet development on the great scale under favourable 
political and social conditions, and that hardly any profane patterns 
were before any but a very few writers, we shall certainly not feel 
inclined to indulge an ignorant and conceited contempt of the 
limitations of subject to religion in the main, and out of religion to a 
little legend, a little contemporary war-song, some rudimentary science, 
and the thinnest surplus of other matters. Take any poet from 
Chaucer to Tennyson and strip him only of what he owes in subject 
— putting other debts, and they are large, out of sight — to his 
predecessors, and a terrible reduction would have to be made. 
Casdmon, if Caedmon it was ; Cynewulf, if Cynewulf there was ; and 
ail the anonyms, had practically no predecessors to oblige them, except 
the Bible, a few hymn- and homily-writers, the Fathers, and a small, 
a very small, part of the profane classics which had not gone utterly 
out of fashion or of reach. 

Of what, under this immense, this to us simply incalculable, dis- 
advantage they accomplished much must have perished, while what 
has perished //lay have largely exceeded what we have, not merely in 
bulk but in variety. On this head at least there is no fault to find, but 
rather infinite credit due to our ancestors, that while no otlier — 
Icelandic, perliaps, excepted — of the modern European languages had 
yet found its tongue at all, or had found it only to let the results 
disappear, they did what they did. 

Nor is tliere exactly any *' fault to find'' with the defects of art 
and means which also beset them, but in this respect somewhat 
harsher language must be used. In the first place, putting enthusiasts 



INTERCH AFTER I 35 



aside, I do not think that any one can call Anglo-Saxon, in familiar 
phrase, a " pretty " language. Though not without a grave undertone 
of music in it now and then, it has a distinct uncouthness. Its 
inflections give it monotony without music ; the rough consonant 
terminations give the word-structure an air rather of a dry-stone wall 
unwrought by hand than of cunning masonry. Afterwards, when 
this roughness was blended with softer forms and matter, it was to 
give the most perfect poetic medium — more perfect even than Greek 

— that has ever existed; at this time the destined completion had 
not been reached, and the language, full of forms in one way, was 
still formless ; crammed with possibilities, was still void, chaotic, 
rudimentary. 

That it chose the prosody most suited to it is no doubt true. 
Every language has, and must inevitably have, the prosody that it 
deserves, the prosody of which it is capable, whence is clear the folly 
of those who desperately attempt to force it into prosodic forms other 
than those into which it naturally goes. And that Old English pros- 
ody has limitations and shortcomings, probably inseparable from Old 
English vocabulary, there is little if any doubt. But there is no 
doubt at all that the limitations and the shortcomings are of the most 
serious character. With some of the objections made to the Anglo- 
Saxon Ars poetica we need by no means concur. The common com- 
plaint that there are no similes may be called almost silly. In the first 
place, there are similes ; and in the second place, if there were none, 
why should there be any? The only possible answer that suggests 
itself turns upon such a childish argument, or no argument, as this, 
" Homer is a great early poet ; Homer is rich in similes ; therefore 
early poets who have no similes are not great." Moreover, simile or 
no simile, Anglo-Saxon poetry, like its cousin Icelandic, is admittedly 
rich in metaphor, which is only simile in the making. When a poet 
has once called the sea the " swan's path," and thought the " breast- 
hoard," he has shown himself perfectly competent to write a simile in 
twenty lines — a simile like that at the end of the Scholar Gypsy itself 

— if he chose to do it. So too we shall not, if we are wise, shake 
our heads because it is rather long before we come to epanaphora or 
antithesis in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The absence or the .slow coming 
of epanaphora and antithesis is no doubt very disheartening, but, as 
Deor himself has it, this also may we overgo. 

The real faults of Anglo-Saxon poetry from the formal point of 
view lie in, and indeed are inseparable from, its staple of accented 
alliterative verse, it may be discretionary, it may be quite carefully 
and cunningly arranged as to syllables, but divided by a hard and 
fast section or middle pause. That fine effects in certain limited 
kinds mav be and have been got out of this arrangement need not 



36 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



be denied ; that it was a great advance on mere systemless chaos 
is of course undeniable. It lent itself with ease to that parallelism 
which is the most natural note of half-civilised poetry. The accents 
gave something of a " stand-b}'," something of a backbone, to save 
the rhythm from becoming merely prosaic. The alliteration supplied 
a musical charm which has never died out of English poetry, and 
therefore never can die out of it. The sections helped the paral- 
lelism, acted as stays to the prentice poet, and assisted the accent 
and the alliteration to give something like a real poetic form, as 
opposed to the form of prose. For a certain meditative kind of 
poetry, like that of the Ruin and the great Phcenix passage, the 
whole scheme is well fitted, and it does not do badly for romantic 
narrative, whether in its earliest form, as in Beowulf, or in its latest 
and almost last, as in Layamon. Nay more, it seems by no means 
absurd to find in it, as I believe some even of its specialist students 
are beginning to do, the germs not indeed of later English poetical 
rliythm, but of that wonderful English prose rhythm which, aimed 
at half-blindly from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, found, 
whether consciously or not, in the seventeenth, but never deliberately 
practised, much less deliberately analysed, till within the last hun- 
dred years, has given something almost as much a pure hybrid 
between poetry and prose in form as drama is a hybrid between them 
in spirit. 

But the defects of its qualities are many and great. When the 
normal scheme, with few unaccented syllables, is kept, it is excessively 
apt to become dull, monotonous, sing-song. When, in the poet's 
need for a longer line and greater variety, it receives the C?edmonian 
extension, it becomes perilously suggestive of the "patter" which has 
been consecrated in more modern times to burlesque and grotesque. 
The excessive and regular alliteration not only becomes wearisome to 
the ear, but also, and inevitably, occasions the selection of words not 
because they are the right words, but merely because they begin with 
the right letter. And the sectional pause is the worst of all. It 
will always remain the most astonishing thing in that extraordinary 
monument of learned and ingenious paralogism, Dr. Guest's English 
Rhythms, that he should have failed to perceive that the beginning of 
great English poetry is synonymous with the abolition of the com- 
pulsory middle pause, and should even have endeavoured to convict 
Shakespeare and Milton of Use-poesie because they do not obey it. 
That the middle pause is wanted in very long lines may be freely 
granted ; in short ones and those of moderate length it cannot with- 
out disadvantage be more than a rule which admits the freest and 
most frequent exception. 

It is probably due to these faults and disabilities, rather than to 



INTERCHAPTER I 37 



any want of genius, that the Anglo-Saxon poets did not do more than 
they did, and it is again and again to be repeated tliat it is surprising 
how much they did. But their poetry, indeed their whole literature, 
is a rudimentary literature, a literature iii statu pupillari, and one 
which has not passed any but the lower stages even of pupilship. 
Even if the most elaborate theories of its prosody be adniitted, the 
case will not be altered : for a certain etiquette of detail is consistent 
with a very early novitiate. It can manage simple prose very well, 
but it cannot achieve argument, elaborate narration, or anything that 
in the proper sense requires style. In the poetry we have been briefly 
reviewing we find some noble passages, especially of a serious and 
reflective cast, a few more showing the joy of battle well, still fewer, 
but some, evincing accurate observation and the power of putting it 
into words. But the class of poetical effects attained, and to all 
appearance attainable, is exceedingly limited, and excludes altogether 
those of the lighter kind. There is practically no lyric — a want which 
would of itself and at once relegate any poetry to a position below, 
and far below, the highest. In short, we have here a juvenile effort, 
as we may call it, of immense interest, but doomed in itself to 
failure, because the person or people making it has not come to its 
full strength, has not entered into possession of its full property, and 
is using clumsy methods and tools on a scanty material, instead of 
employing the results of the experience of the past in method on 
the gathered treasures of the past in stuff. 



BOOK II 

THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
CHAPTER I 

THE TRANSITION 

The sleep of English — Awakening influences — Latin — French influence — Geoffrey 
of Monmouth — Latin prosody in the early Middle Ages — The Hymns — 
Alliteration and rhyme — Rhythm and metre — French prosody — Syllabic 
equivalence in English — Helped by Anglo-Saxon — Law of pause in English 

To say that English literature ^ dives underground some time before 
the Conquest, and does not emerge again till about the year 1200, 
would be an exaggeration ; but it would only be an exaggeration of 
the truth. As a matter of fact, we have nothing certainly dating from 
any part of this long period of a hundred and fifty years except tlie 
later passages of the Worcester and Peterborough 
Chronkles, the latest of which does not go beyond the oT^Engh'sh 
year 1155, though just before this there are pages of 
merit, especially that famous one already referred to as to the sufferings 
of the English people under Stephen. It is probable that the Grave 
Poem, and perhaps some other fragments in verse, date from this 
time ; it is tolerably certain that some of the Anglo-Saxon Homilies 
and Saints' Lives which we possess, either as more or less original 
compositions or refashionings of older ones, date from it. But these 

1 There is unfortunately no adequate literary history of the Middle English 
period. Vols. iii. and iv. and the earlier part of vol. v. of the late Professor 
Morley's English Writers deal with it, but are chiefly occupied with a crowd of 
extraneous matters. Ten Brink (vol. i. Books ii. and iii.) is much better, but not 
all-sufficing. There is ample information in vol. ii. of the Variorum li'arlon 
(London, 1871), but it is necessarily chaotic and indigestible. Luckily the texts 
themselves are now fairly, though not fully, accessible; unluckily they have too 
often been edited from the merely linguistic point of view. 

39. 



40 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

things only touch the fringe of literature, and there are extremely few 
of them.i Yet during this long sleep, so scantily broken, a process 
was going on analogous to, but far more momentous and thorough 
than, the ordinary refreshment by the "season of all natures." We 
have said that the powers of English, not merely as a literature but as 
a language, were obviously failing even within the very restricted 
circle in which they had walked before the Conquest itself; it remains 
now to indicate as briefly as possible what the influences were which 
came to transform and refresh these powers, and how they went to 
work. The actual instruments were two, Latin and French ; and 
their working was directed to three difterent points of attack — the 
alteration of the language as such ; the suggestion of new subjects 
and forms of literature ; and, above all, the constiiiction of a new 
prosody. 

The notice of literatures and literary works not English has been 
limited, according to the plan of this book, to the strictest necessities, 
and among these necessities the present occasion must be counted. 
We can, moreover, economise under the first head of the last divi- 
sion, for the mere linguistic side of the matter but faintly concerns 
us. It is .sufficient there to say that the diff"erent inflection of French 
and Latin (as, it is thought, the diiferent inflections of Danish had 
already done) helped the already displayed tendency of the language 
to shake ofl" inflection almost if not altogether, though this was a work 
of time ; and that the swelling of the vocabulary with Latin or 
Romance words, though inevitable, is not, as we shall see when we 
come to actual literature once more, very noticeable in the first place. 
The eftect of the exhibition of new forms and subjects was much more 
momentous, and to understand it we must try a '• Pisgah-sight " of 
Latin and French literature as each then was. 

In considering the effect on English of Latin, we must not assume, 

as used to be assumed, that classical Latin was out of the ken or 

knowledge of the early Middle Ages. It was not ; and there were 

then Englishmen, such as Joseph of Exeter, who could 

influences. Write excellent hexameters on a fairly Virgilian or at least 

Latin. Claudianic model, though they might sometimes con- 
descend to leonine or middle rhyme ; while, as we need not go beyond 
Chaucer to show, large parts of the classical poets, especially Ovid, 
were distinctly familiar. Indeed, it may perhaps be said with safety 

1 For instance, Mr. Morlcy ekes out the assumption that "no doubt" there 
was verse, with the well-known Canute Poem, A ffrry sari^^f the monks of Efy,i\\& 
verses attributed to Godric of Finchale, and Sinner is iciimen in. But if the 
Canute Poem has any interest of authenticity it must be much older, and Sumer 
is icumcn in is pretty certainly much younger, than 1050-1150. Godric (d. 1 170) 
is more to the point. His verses are but the meagrest scraps, but they show 
rhyme and metre. 



CHAP. I THE rRANSnTO;«J 41 

that of all classical writers Ovid had most influence, though others 
had some. But the singular and still slightly puzzling thing in con- 
nection with this subject is that readers, even readers of considerable 
education and great ability, seem to have observed no critical pro- 
portion whatever in their relative estimate of authorities, either from 
the point of view of matter or from the point of view of form. They 
preferred in the " Tale of Troy," not merely to Homer, whom they knew 
but little, but to Virgil, whom they knew fairly, and to Ovid, whom 
they knew well, two beggarly abstracts assigned to a certain Dictys 
and a certain Dares, for which they had absolutely no external authority, 
and which bore internal marks of absolute worthlessness as literature, 
if not of absolute untrustworthiness as history. They swallowed, 
though they had abundance of fairly sober abstracts of history, if 
they had not all original authorities, huge farragos of mere fairy tales 
about Alexander. And, generally speaking, the actual classics exer- 
cised, naturally enough, much less direct influence upon them, espe- 
cially in the point of form, than the writers of the decadence and 
the darkness from the fourth century downwards. And, as was yet 
more natural, they attached more importance still to the Services of 
the Church, to the devotional writings of ecclesiastics in verse and 
prose ; while by degrees they began to elaborate for themselves an 
almost entirely new system of philosophy, which the natural clearness 
and precision of Latin enabled them to make admirably systematic and 
scientific in terminology, though the terms might be barbarous in 
form. With Anglo-Saxon failing, and no other vernacular except the 
distant and thoroughly isolated Icelandic come to full maturity, the 
practice of history-writing became for a long period entirely Latin, 
and the usage of that tongue in the schools further established it as 
the language not merely of philosophy but of general science. 

The spoken influence of French, or at least Anglo-Norman, was 
naturally even greater, for it was for centuries the only court 
language, the language of superior business, and to some extent at 
any rate the necessary vehicle of communication between 
the upper and lower classes, though not between the in^fluence 
lower classes themselves. But its literary influence was 
very considerably less. What has been already said must be re- 
peated, that at the time of the Conquest, and much more, therefore, 
at the time of the first influence of French at the court of Edward 
the Confessor, the foreigners had little, or practically no, literature 
to off'er as an example to England. They had no prose; their great 
national epics were only beginning ; it is improbable that they had 
any finished lyric in durable form ; the romances proper were in the 
British division not yet written (they had pretty certainly to come 
from England itself), and in the case of the classical division were 



42 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

only beginning to be written. French drama was lisjjing or still 
inarticulate ; tlie great French genre of the fabliau was hardly born. 
In short, French literature could e.xercise no influence, because it as 
yet was merely struggling for existence itself. 

No doubt, when it once began it made gigantic strides, while it so 
happened that the parts of France where some of these kinds saw the 
light were directly under the rule of or closely connected with the 
Kings of England. Proven9al led the way, though probably not by 
much, in formal lyric; and more than half the Proven9al-speaking 
districts were sooner or later brought under English rule by the 
accession of the Angevins and the marriage of Henry H. with 
Eleanor of Guienne. The British and Roman "matters" were 
specially Norman in place of treatment, and from England itself 
came a book which, though in Latin, had such an enormous influence 
upon English literature that it must receive exceptional treatment 
here. This is the Historia Britonuin of Geoftrey of Monmouth, 
which was probably written almost simultaneously with — at least 
within a decade or two of — the last gasp of pure original Anglo-Saxon 
in the Annals of Peterborough. 

Not much is known of GeoiTrey, who must, however, have either 
been one of the most superlatively lucky persons in literary history 
or an original genius of the greatest mark. He was certainly con- 
secrated Bishop of St. Asaph in 1152, and must have 
M^°nmout'tf ^^^^ about two years later. His book is dedicated to 
Robert, Earl of Gloucester, who died in 1147, so that it 
cannot be later than that date, while some have put it back ten or fifteen 
years earlier. He himself claims (with almost transparent '-make- 
believe " as it seems to some) to have had a British original brought to 
him out of Armorica by a certain Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. But 
nothing has ever been seen or heard of such a book, and even 
•' Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford," is difficult, if not impossible, to 
identify. Nor have any other materials for Geoffrey's tlistory been 
traced, save that in the case of its most famous, though f;ir from its 
largest episode, the story of King Arthur, certain germs, excessively 
meagre in substance and very uncertain in date, can be found in 
certain documents attributed to Gildas, a monk of the fifth century, 
and Nennius, an unknown person who may have written in the seventh, 
the eighth, or the ninth, if not later, together with a Life of Gildas, 
which is certainly not much, if any, earlier than Geoffrey.^ 

1 Geoffrey himself, Gildas, and Nennius will be found convenientlv trans- 
lated in one volume of Bohn's " Antiquarian Library," entitled Six Old English 
Chrnnklcs. I do not know any translation of the Vita Giliae (ed. Stevenson), and 
the Latin published half a century ago for the English Historical Society is 
not very accessible. The texts of Nennius vary a good deal. 



THE TRANSITION 43 



The debt which English literature owes to this curious book is 
not limited to the Arthurian part, for Geoflfrey has given us the 
original story o{ King Lear, the most heartrending of English, or any, 
tragedies ; the ending at least of Comiis, the most exquisite of English, 
or any, masques ; and other things. But in magnitude, in interest, 
and as a literary origin, the Arthurian invention dwarfs all other 
things in the book. It should be observed that by no means the 
whole story of Arthur, as we familiarly know it from Sir Thomas 
Malory's greatest of all compilations, is in Geoffrey. He represents 
the treason of Vortigern to Britain as partly repaired by two brothers, 
Ambrosius and Uther. The latter, reigning alone, falls in love with 
Igraine, wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, gains her by the help 
of the enchanter Merlin, who has already played a great part in 
the story, and becomes the father of Arthur, who succeeds him, 
crushes opposition at home, marries a noble lady of Roman de- 
scent, Guanhumara (Guinevere), joins issue with and defeats the 
Romans on the Continent, is recalled by the treason of his nephCxW 
Madred, whom Guanhumara has married, returns, defeats and 
finally slays the traitor, but is mortally wounded, and gives up the 
crown, being carried to the Isle of Avilion to be healed of -his 
wounds. 

The Middle Ages, despite what we hear and talk about their 
defects of communication and the like, are famous for the almost 
unintelligible rapidity of their literary diffusion in some cases. But, in 
none is this so remarkable as in the case of the Arthurian story, which, 
if not entirely invented on the meagre. basis of Nennius by Geoffrey 
himself, can at most have some other basis of Welsh legends", chiefly 
about Merlin. We have seen that the book cannot have been 
written much earlier than 11 30, and may not have been written till a 
few years before 11 50. It appears that before the later date it 
was already turned into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar, wJiose 
version is lost ; and shortly after Geoffrey of Monmouth's own death 
by Wace of Jersey, whose version remains. Fresh legends or sheer 
invention furnished Wace with some important additions, and, as we 
shall see, he handed it on to the first English handler of the story, 
the poet Layamon. But the development of the whole into a real 
romance occupied pens in verse and prose during the later part, prob- 
ably the third quarter, of the century, in a manner the exact account 
and distribution of which is still a mystery. The chief credit used to 
be assigned, and the present writer is still inclined to assign tt, to 
Walter Map or Mapes, a native of the Welsh marches, and the author 
not merely of a very curious and interesting Latin miscellany called 
De IVugis Curialiui/i, but, by possible attribution at least, of a still 
more interesting collection of stodent poems, satires on church 



44 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book il 

dignitaries, etc., issued under the general no/u de guerre of "Golias."^ 
At much the same time, later or earlier, Chrestien de Troyes, a 
French poet, gave poetical versions of many parts of the legend. But 
the complete execution of this in verse or in prose belongs, in 
language at least, to French not to English literature, till it was 
magnificently vindicated for its native soil by Malory three centuries 
later. The probably earliest English version after Layamon will be 
found noticed in the next chapter but one, as that of Laj'amon will be 
found in the very next. 

The opportunity of an example of unmatched pertinence has 
taken us a little way from the actual stream of English literature to 
illustrate the manner in which that literature drew its subjects from 
literatures other than English. This wassail the more desirable 
because at this very time such new stocks of subjects were simply 
pouring in from East and West and North and South alike. We must 
return to show how a change greater far than any mere introduction 
of subject — the introduction of the true and universal prosody of 
English instead of the cramped and parochial rhythm of Anglo-Saxon 
— came about, showing at the same time how the surviving virtue of 
that rhythm itself differentiates English metre, as it was to be, from 
that of other modern languages. 

It appears probable, and the reasons which make it so have been 
already partly set forth, that it was Latin even more than French that 
effected this transmutation. It is therefore unnecessary for even the 
most sensitive patriot to be jealous of what has been rather absurdly 
called "the rhythm of the foreigner." Latin, to the Middle Ages, was 
T . , not foreign in any country, just as it was mother tongue 

Latin prosody ^ j j'j i., , 

in the early in none. It was in Church and State alike the common 
Middle Ages, gpgg^,]^^ ^|^g common literary stock of Christendom ; the 
very Italian himself, and still more the Goths and Franks who spoke 
the other Rom.ance tongues, had hardly more part in it than the Anglo- 
Saxon. And the Latin prosody, as well as the Latin vocabulary, that 
affected English poetry once for all in the centuries between looo and 
1400 A.D. was Latin enormously changed by influences which may 
have been themselves barbarian in origin. It is improbable that 
we shall ever exactly know the causes of the change which we first 
observe in Prudentius, and which becomes ever more noticeable. It 
may be that, as some will have it, the elaborate classical prosody of 
Latin was a mere interlude, that " the rhythm of the foreigner " was 
introduced from Greece, and for a time superimposed with crushing 

1 Both edited for the Camden Society by Thomas Wright, whose services to 
Middle English literature were inferior to those of no man, dead or living, in his 
numerous editions of texts, and in his Diographia Diitannica Literaria (2 vols. 
London — Anglo-Saxon Period, 1842; Anglo-Norman Period, 1846). 



THE TRANSITION 45 



weight on a natural accentual prosody such as we see partly indi- 
cated in "Saturnian" fragments. But what is certain is that, from 
the end of the fourth century onward, there is observable a movement 
(whether of innovation or reaction is not here essential) which not 
only alters to the most material extent the quantity of syllables, but also, 
as a consequence or independently, conditions the structure of verse. 
And this change is seen more especially in the compositions which 
were certain to exert most effect upon the vernaculars, the Hymns of 
the Church. For not only were these sure to resound in 
millions of ears, the eyes corresponding to which were very 
unlikely to read written literature, secular or sacred, but the music 
by which they were accompanied was equally certain to familiarise 
the ear, and with the rhythm to impress it on the brain, and make it 
likely to be reproduced in vernacular composition, especially when 
the prosodic forms more specially belonging to that composition had 
gone almost entirely out of use. 

Now, the characteristics of this kind of verse were chiefly two, 
and each of these was in direct and striking contrast with the 
corresponding characteristics of Anglo-Saxon. In the 
lirst place, though alliteration might by accident appear and^rh^'me 
in them, its regular presence as a distinguishing poetic 
form, a regulator and mainspring of rhythm, was entirely absent, 
and was replaced by rhyme ^ both middle and end, but especially the 
latter. And in the second place, the requirement of a certain 
number of " accented " syllables, not even itself insisted on 
with absolute rigidity, and accompanied by the vaguest ^*^^|etrc ^"'^ 
and widest license of inserting syllables that were unac- 
cented, was replacecl by the system of definite metre, composed of 
syllabic integers either identical or equivalent. 

This influence had already exerted itself on the so-called Romance 
languages, and so in the case of the second foreign influence — French 
— Anglo-Saxon found itself confronted with an ally of Latin, or let 
us say with a pupil who had already passed his freshmanship. But 
French had received the Latin influence and instruction in its own 
way. One of those strange and infinitely interesting, 
though also infinitely mysterious, idiosyncrasies of Ian- prosody, 
guage, which students of philology and phonetics too 
often neglect, had brought it about that French should be a language 
in which the distinction of syllabic value (call it ''long" or ''short," 

1 "Rhyme," not "rime." "Rime" in English means "hoar-frost," and 
we need not introduce an unnecessary ambiguity, against the practice of all our 
greatest writers, save, perhaps, one. Nay, the suggested etymology of pv9fx6s, 
if false, shows the instinctive recognition of the fact, first formulated by Mitford, 
that " rhyme is a time-beater," not a mere tinkHng t;ig. 



46 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book li 

•' accented " or " unaccented," " heavy " or " light," or by any op- 
position of words which may be preferred as least controversial) is, 
and seems always to have been, less marked tlian in almost any 
other. It followed from this that trisyllabic feet — that is to say, feet 
in which one syllable is intrinsically strong, long, heavy, or what not, 
enough to take two weaker, shorter, lighter ones on its back and 
preserve them distinct from others — were never jjrevalent in French, 
and for many centuries have been non-existent. And it followed 
from this again that " syllabic equivalence " — that is to say, the 
principle by which one strong, long, heavy syllable may be .substituted 
for two weak, short, light ones, and vice versa — has in the regular 
prosody of France never had any place, while even in doggerel, in 
comic songs, and the like, syllables, if they are not to count at full, 
have to be simply slurred or omitted, as may be seen in the printed 
works of the lighter French songsters. 

Now there was, and from what has been said it will be seen that 
this also was natural, something of a reflex tendency in Latin non- 
classical verse to imitate this characteristic of the Romance tongues, 
which showed itself also in Provengal, in Italian, and to a less degree 
in Spanish. And undoubtedly the crucial question was whether 
English would follow it and them in this respect. For centuries, as 

„ „ , . we shall see, the question was undecided — nay. at the 

Syllabic ' ^ _,..". 

equivalence in present day there are some persons of distinction who 
English. ^^,jj| j^^yg j^ ^.]^g^|. |-|^g^g jg jjQ syllabic equivalence in 

English, and who resort to slurring, to " extrametrical syllables," and to 
all manner of strange devices to twist out of this great, this cardinal, 
this supreme feature of our poetry. For it is this — the possibility, 
namely, of substituting almost anywhere, with due precautions, dactyl 
or tribracli or anapaest for iamb or trochee ^ — which, when the example 
of Spenser to some extent, and the inestimable license of the great 
dramatists far more, had given it an unquestioned right of place in 
literature, and when it had allied with itself the shaking off of the rigid 
caesura or pause, endowed English verse with that astonishing and 
unparalleled variety of music which puts it at the head of the poetry 
of the modern world. 

And we should be doing Anglo-Saxon a grave injustice if we did 
not recognise that one of its main poetical features undoubtedly 
helped to bring about this blessed result, and that was the old 
license of putting in unaccented syllables almost ad libitum. Indeed, 
some authorities would recognise a formal and regular equivalence 
in Anglo-Saxon itself. The sectional arrangement of Anglo-Saxon 

1 Strictly speaking, of course, only the tribrach corresponds to the trochee or 
iamb. But, as in Greek itself, dactyls and anapaests (though not, I think, cretics 
or am|)hihrachs) claim a place. 



THE TRANSITION 47 



was less beneficial, and would, if maintained, as there was for some 
centuries a blind effort to retain it, have been very 
mischievous. But here too the dramatists, with Shake- ^eipedby 

' Anglo-baxun. 

speare at their head, came to the rescue, and, with the 

aid of thdr mighty follower Milton, once for all established the 

following law : — 

In an English heroic line, as well as in any sJiorter one^ the pause 
may fall after the first or any subsequent syllable to the 
penultimate, while there need not be any distinct pause in^English!^ 
at all. 

But we must now see in detail what the actual history of Middle 
English literature was. 

1 In the Alexandrine and longer lines a pause is necessary, somewhere about 
the middle, when they are used continuously, though not always in isolated 
applications like Spenser's. But it is a question whether these lines are not more 
or less disguised distic/is, a fact of wliich the sixteenth-century practice of printing 
them in halves was a clumsy recognition. 



CHAPTER II 

FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 

1 200-1250 

Layamon's Brut — The Onmilum — Its spelling— Its metre — The Ancren Rhule — 
The Moral Ode — Genesis and Exodus — The Bestiary — The Orison of our 
Lady — Proverbs of Alfred and Hendyiig — Tlie Oiol and the Nightingale 

The dates of the books — not numerous, but, in some cases at least, 
both important and interesting — which compose the first growth of 
Middle English literature, or what used to be called " Semi-Saxon," 
are known with very little certainty. But a ch'ca of reasonable 
probability can generally be attached to them, and there seems very 
little doubt that about the close of the twelfth and the beginning of 
the thirteenth centuries something like a distinct first-crop made its 
appearance. It is natural that the subjects of this new literature 
should, like those of the old, be at first mainly religious. But they 
soon ranged more widely, and, as it happens, the most important of 
all in bulk and in contents, if not also in actual literary quality, is 
secular. 

This is the famous Brut ^ of Layamon, which we possess in two 
forms, one assigned by scholars to the earliest and the other to the 
latest years of the half-century which has been subsumed for this 

chapter. The differences between these two versions, 
^^^Brut'^ though occasionally, as in the case of the name of the 

author's father,'-^ a little puzzling, are of great value for 
linguistics, and they are by no means unimportant for literary history 
proper, inasmuch as we perceive in the later version the distinct 
enlargement of the intrusion of rhyme, which is already noticeable in 
the earlier. But in mere contents the later version is, .somewhat con- 
trary to the wont of mediaeval times, shortened rather than watered 

1 Ed. Madden, 3 vols. London, 1847. 

2 In the earlier text we have " Layamon the son of Leovenath," in the later 
" Laweman the son of Leuca." 

48 



CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE. ENGLISH PERIOD 49 

out; and it is also in much worse condition, having suffered by 
that too famous fire in the Cottonian Library which plays in Early 
English literary history an actual and historical counterpart to Caleb 
Balderstone's thunderstorm in fiction. Fortunately for the student 
of letters, both are contained in one of the best, as in one of the 
handsomest, editions which have fallen to the lot of any Early English 
classic.^ 

Layamon, the son of Leovenath, of whom we know nothing save 
from his own words, appears to have been a priest at Arley or Ernley 
(a village near Bewdley, on the Severn), into whose hands Wace's 
translation of Geoffrey of Moji mouth fell. He combined with it, as 
he teTls us, Bede, historical works by " Albinus " and " Austin," 
which have, not been identified, though the first may have been some 
lost Latin original of Bede's own,^ and (but this he does not tell us) 
apparently either traditions of the Welsh marches, near which he 
lived, or some imaginations of his own. The result is a Brut, or 
British History, of great length,^ displaying occasionally no small 
literary power, very interesting as the first English book on the great 
legendary history of England, and absolutely priceless as showing the 
inroads which the influences described^ in the last chapter were 
making upon the effete rules and weakened powers of Anglo-Saxon. 

In mere vocabulary the change is~by no means gr^at. Authori- 
ties differ as to the number of French words used, but none sets it 
above an almost infinitesimal proportion.* Yet the forms of the 
language are unmistakably altering, ancl the forms of prosody are 
altering more unmistakably still. The general structure is still the 
unrhymed alliterative line of two short sections. But an absolutely 
perfect example of the older form — four accents, three alliterations, 
no rhyme whatever, and a rhythm often not marked at all according 
to any metrical systejji, and only vaguely trochaic when sensible — 
is the exception, an exception appearing at long intervals. Constantly 
the alliteration is broken down. Very frequently rhymes appear 
between the line-halves — rhymes of a simple and obvious kind, 
" brother " and " other," " king " and " thing," '' night " and " light," 
etc., but for that very reason all the easier, all the more tempting, 

1 Sir Frederic Madden's Layamon, like Thorpe's Ctedinon and Exeter Book, 
was published by the Society of Antiquaries, which unfortunately did not find 
encouragement to go further. 

-"Albinus" of Canterbury was one of Bede's authorities. 

3 Text A contains over 32,000 lines or half-lines; Text B seems to have liad 
about 24,000, of which more than the odd 4000 are lost or damaged. The older 
practice of printing Anglo-Saxon verse in half-lines is distinctly preferable here, 
because the change of rhythm and the inroad of rhyme are more clearly shown. 

■* Madden allows about 50 in A, about 80 in B; Professor Skeat puts the 
total at 170. 



50 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

and all the more frequent in occurrence. Most important of all, the 
unmetrical or vaguely trochaic cadence tends steadily towards, and 
sometimes reaches, the full and exact octosyllabic couplet, rhymed 
and complete. When we come across such a couplet as — 

Tha answeraede Vortiger, 
Of elchen ufel he was war ; 

still more when we find that in the fifty years' interval between the 
two versions the terminations •' Appollin " and " wel iwon " have 
been changed into "Appollin" and "of great win," the inference 
is unmistakable. Rhymed metre has challenged on rhymed rhythm, 
and is slowly driving it out. 

As for the substance of Layamon, it may be regarded from two 
points of view : his additions to his predepessors, as far as we have 
these latter, and hi s hand ling of his subjects, oiQ^inal or added. The 
list of the former given by Sir Frederick Madden fills two large pages, 
and includes among its_more important items the legend of Oriene 
(the name which Layamon gives to St. Ursula of the Eleven Thousand 
Virgins), a much fuller account of Rowena's appearance as Dalilah, 
the all-important additions to the Arthurian\ story that "elves" 
figured at the King's birth and took him to Avalon,i the foundation 
of the Round Table, and numerous details of Arthur's wars with 
rebels and invaders and Romans. From the latter point of view 
particular attention may be directed to the whole of the Rowena 
story, which Layamon works into a much completer romance-episode 
than any previous writer whose work has come to us,- and the whole 
of the Arthurian passages. These latter have not indeed received 
the immense addition to their interest which is given (possibly by 
Layamon's earlier contemporary and neighbour by birth, Walter 
Map) in the Anglo-French romances on the subject, but it is in itself 
a much greater advance upon Wace than Wace is upon Geoffrey, 
and it displays much more poetical capacity than the Jerseyman's. 
Indeed, when we give fair weight to the fact that Layamon was like 
an animal which is struggling out of its old shell or skin into a new 
one. and has not half completed the process, the poetical merit of his 
work deserves to be set far higher than it has usually been put. A 
"chronicler," as he is sometimes called, he is not, though he may 

1 Their queen is here "Aigante," of course the same as the "Morgane" of 
the more usu;il stories and the " Urganda " of Peninsular revival in Amadis. 

2 It is luckily accessible to those who do not possess the whole in Morns and 
Skcafs Spccimem o/Earlv English, part i. p. 64. I could wish that (instead of 
the whole of King Horn, of which a fifth, or ten pages, would well suffice) 
much larger extracts from Layamon were given in this invaluable book. There is 
plenty to choose from. 



CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 51 

have thought himself one. He is really the first writer of romance in 
English of whom we know. 

The second great poetical work — or at least work in verse — of this 
time, the Or»iulu>n,^ is far inferior in interest of subject to the Brut, 
for it is simply one of the numerous and always more or less lame 
homiletic paraphrases of the Scriptures — in this case 
busied with the Gospels for each day. We have not Ormuhun. 
the whole set, but a considerable part of it, extending 
to some 10,000 lines of fifteen syllables each, or double that number 
if the poem be divided into couplets of eight and seven. The author, 
of whom nothing is known except from this work, was one Orm 
or Ormin, an Augustinian monk, probably resident somewhere in 
the east of England, or in Northern Mercia. He addresses a cer- 
tain Walter, whom he terms threefold his brother — in the flesh, in 
faith, and in monastic order. Of actual poetical merit it is not too 
much to say that Orm has nothing, and it is at the same time noti 
paradoxical to add that his work is much more valuable by reason on 
certain characteristics which it possesses than one of much greater 
poetical merit without these characteristics could have been to us 

The first of his peculiarities lies in his spelling. It would have 
been in any case probable that the jostling of English by French and 
Latin should have effected some confusion in English pronunciation, 
while this confusion would also be assisted by the variety 
of dialects still prevalent in " Semi-Saxon.-' At any ^ ^^^ '"^' 
rate Orm, who seems to have been a purist in the matter, and to have 
had a sensitive ear, was offended by this, and determined to adopt 
a plan which should at least prevent short vowels from being sounded 
long and vice versa. In order to do this he seized upon the prin- 
ciple — sound English to this day, and fatal to what is called American 
spelling — that caeteris paribus, and in the absence of special know- 
ledge to the contrary, a vowel before two consonants will be pro- 
nounced short in English, a vowel before one consonant long. And 
regardless of the extraordinary effect produced to the eye — indeed 
this was of less consequence before the days of printing, and of least 
in the days when reading was not so much reading as recitation — he 
steadily doubled the consonant after every short vowel, even when there 
could, as in the case of the infinitive hrifingcnn, " to bring," be practi- 
cally no danger. The eifect in appearance is naturally hideous and 
grotesque ; as a monument in literary, or at least linguistic, history the 
practice (the observance of which the author solemnly enjoins on any 
scribe who shall copy his work) is priceless. 

As valuable, and more strictly literary, is Orm's metrical arrange- 

lEd. White and Holt, 2 vols. Oxford, 1878. 



4 y^ 

ter f^^ 



52 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



ment. His prosody is distinguished from Old English by being 
neither accentual nor (at least regularly) alliterative, nor tolerant of 
extrametrical syllables. It is distinguished from classical 
Latin by having no syllabic equivalence nor any tri- 
syllabic feet. If its metre — a strict iambic form of tetrameter 
catalectic, or alternate dimeters acatalectic and catalectic — occurs 
anywhere in Latin hymns, it must be very rare, and Orm has no 
rhyme. The general opinion is that he adapted it from the hymns, 
in principle, whether from an actual example or not. But I suspect 
also the influence of French, where strict syllabic prosody had long 
been established. 

Now nothing can be more reasonable as a matter of expectation, 
or more valuable as a matter of fact, than that in this period of 
groping and experiment, of endeavouring to suit the old bottle to the 
new wine, some one should have selected, as Orm apparently did, 
the method of hard-and-fast syllabic prosody, unhelped, uninfluenced 
even by rhyme. It is not a success ; it is contrary to the genius of 
English, though strangely enough there are even now persons who cling 
to the idea. But there is no doubt that the attempt was one of the 
experiments which had to be made, if partially to fiiil, and that in the 
very failure it did good by curbing and restraining the English 
tendency to slipshod doggerel with rhyme to match. 

Nor ought we to put the actual value of the Ortnuluin too low. 
It is stiff, monotonous, bolstered out here and clipped there to suit 
the hard-and-fast rhytlim, occasionally of a most prosaic and pro- 
voking sing-song. But it ought to be remembered that sing-song 
was exactly what English wanted. It was the defect in cadence, the 
substitution of rhetorical for strictly poetical effect, which was the 
greatest shortcoming of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Here at least there 
was no such defect, though the verse not unnaturally tumbled into 
the opposite fault of too monotonous ictus, of an effect like that 
which has been whimsically transferred from the King of France in 
the rhyme to French verse, of marching up the hill and then march- 
ing down again with remorseless alternation. In morals to go into 
one extreme in order to cure the other is a dubious recipe ; but in 
other matters it is the one most familiar, most generally applied, and 
perhaps most generally effective. That something better ought to 
come and would come than the half-alliterative, half-rhymed, half- 
rhythmical, half-metrical jumble of Layamon was clear; that it would 
be something also different from, and much better than, the stiff 
rhymeless cadence of Ormin was clear likewise. But this was the 
necessary tack in one direction as that was in the otlier, and between 
them, with other minor veerings to help, they brouglit the ship through 
the troublesome middle passage of the tliirteenth and early fourteenth 



FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 53 



centuries safe into the open sea where Chaucer took command, and 
where she has sailed since, and may sail, we hope, for evermore. 

The third capital work of the earliest period of Middle English 
is not like the Brut and the Ormulniii in verse, but in prose, though 
it resembles the Onnuliim in belonging to sacred not to profane litera- 
ture. It is thus less important than either in the history of literary 
form, tliougii as an example of pleasant, easy prose-writing it shows a 
considerable advance on any Anglo-Saxon prose that we possess, 
and its interest of subject, of tone, and temper is very considerable. 
This is the Aiicren Riwle ^ or Rule of Anchoresses, xhe 
written by an unknown person for the guidance of three ^"ff'" 
ladies who had taken the vows, but belonged to no 
order, abiding in a free female hermitage at Tarrant Keynes in 
Dorsetshire. This book is partly a devotional manual, six of its 
eight books, or " deals," being devoted to what the author calls 
the Inner Rule — the cultivation of the soul by guarding against sin 
and practising piety. The first handles services and ceremonial 
matters ; the last, the daily life of the recluses. The characteristic 
of these practical parts is a curiously wide and liberal spirit of charity, 
informed by good sense and human feeling. The hermitage of 
Tarrant Keynes was no Abbey of Theleme : its motto is fa/s ce que 
dois, not fais ce que voudf-as, and the writer is perfectly well aware 
of what comes of the unlimited indulgence of sense and will. But he 
not only does not advise, he distinctly reprobates and forbids, exces- 
sive austerities, and is never weary of dwelling on the contrast between 
the Inner and Outer Rule, and the superior importance of the former. 
The strictly devotional parts are animated by a mysticism which is 
of the kindly order likewise, and the illustrations, parables, and the 
like are frequently of considerable literary interest, while the style 
shows at least possibilities of splendour as well as an actual command 
of ease. 

The rhyming productions of this period are of less individual bulk, 
but in almost every case (except those of the Homilies and Lives of 
Saints) they possess literary as well as linguistic importance. One or 
two of these, if we could believe some authorities, preceded even Lay- 
amon and Orm by the greater part of a century. But this, as will be 
seen, is nearly inconceivable. 

1 Extracts of this appeared in Wright and Halliwell's Reliquiae Aiitiquac in 
1841-43. It was completely published by the Rev. James Morton for the Camden 
Society in 1853. The authorship is quite uncertain : it has been assigned to two 
Bishops of Salisbury; Simon of Ghent, who died too late, 1313, to have written a 
book probably of the earliest years of the thirteenth century ; and Richard Poore, 
who was certainly born and lived at Tarrant, and whose time (he died in 1237) 
suits well enough. But there is no evidence of his having written it. It was widely 
popular, and was translated both in prose and verse. 



54 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



The most important, perhaps, and according to the authorities just 
mentioned the oldest, is the somewhat celebrated Foeina Morale, or 
Moral Ode, published at the beginning of the last century 
'^^^Ode"^^ by Hickes.^ This, which answers to its name, is a dis- 
quisition in verse on the rapid passing of life, on the fact 
that growth in years and in goods does not always, or often, mean 
growth in wisdom or in grace, on the importance of good works, the 
certainty of Judgment, and the like. It is, though necessarily dealing 
with commonplaces, good literature, and its metrical form is very re- 
markable ; while the language, for all its age, is in parts so modern 
tliat scarcely anything more than the slightest alteration in spelling is 
necessary to make the first four lines intelligible : — 

I am elder tlian I was in winter(s) and eke lore; 
I wield more than I did: my wit ought to be more; 
Well longe I have child ibeen in worke and eke in deede; 
Though I be in winters old, too young am I in rede. 

It will be seen that this form is different from anything hitherto 
noticed, and that it is identical, not only almost but altogether, with 
the most insignificant differences, with the swinging "fourteener" 
which was almost the staple verse of English literature at the end of 
the early and middle sixteenth century, and which has never gone out 
since. 

Now Professor Ten Brink not only thinks that this metre is all but 
identical with Orm's, but believes that the poem may be as early as 
the reign of Henry I. The first position is, I think, a clear mistake. 
It is true that occasionally the lines of the Odegw^ us the full Onnitlum 
fifteener with iambic cadence, while the feminine termination which 
distinguishes it is rigidly maintained. But as a rule, as the already 
given example will show, the first syllable is cut off, the cadence 
becomes trochaic, and what is more, there is a distinct tendency, if 
not to the definite insertion of trisyllabic equivalents, to a hop, a slur, 
a quaver, breaking the steady "thid-thud" of Walter's excellent brother. 
Nor is the rhyme a less important or a less disturbing addition. This, 
however, is one of those points which it may not be easy to make clear 
to a foreigner's ear — a fact which no doubt should render all foreigners 
chary of committing themselves on prosodies not their own. The 
other position is more arguable. 

How is it possible when we find after 1200 (the certainly 
earliest possible date of the Briii), even up to 1250 (that of the Owl 
and Nightitigale, etc.), metrical as opposed to rhythmical scansion 

1 It has been several times reprinted, and will be found complete in two differ- 
ent texts (which are supposed to represent about the same difference, 1200 and 
1250, as those of the Dnit), in Morris and Skeat, op. cit. i. 194, sq. 



CHAP. 11 FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 55 

barely struggling in, that not long after iioo a perfect metrical 
swing of the modern kind should have been attained by one poet, 
and should somehow or other have failed to appear in any other? 
Observe too, that the rhyme is not middle-rhyme, the earlier, but 
end-rhyme, the later kind ; that the author keeps it up with ease, in- 
stead of using only the most obvious and recurrent rhymes, and lapsing 
continually, as Layamon, much later than iioo, did. Of the language 
I do not profess to speak as an expert in even a slight degree. But 
of the metrical form I will say boldly that it is rather astonishingly 
advanced even for the middle of the thirteenth century, wliich is the 
time most probably assigned to it. And it would be almost equally 
astonishing if the rhymed Paternoster which we also have, and 
which Ten Brink assigns to the later half of the twelfth century, were 
of that date, couched as it is in the regular octosyllabic couplets 
which again we only find struggling into existence in Layamon. 
There will be few occasions in the course of this history on which 
we can allow ourselves even as much discussion of controversial 
points as this. But the order of the change in prosody is too 
important to dispense with it wholly here. 

As it so happens, however (and here, as in the case of La3'amon, 
the possession is precious not merely for philological but for true 
literary reasons), we possess more versions than one of the Poeiiia 
Morale, and the comparison of them establishes the unlikelihood of 
an early date for its more finished metrical form. The sober and 
even yet hardly disputed authority of the late Dr. Morris does not 
venture to put even the elder of these earlier than "before 1200," 
the later he dates more plumply as " 1250." And even in the 1200 
version we see that the proper metrical form is only struggling out 
of the shell, which it has not thoroughly chipped till later. In the 
earlier we find such a line as this — 

Elche time sal be man of-)>unche his misdade; 

which becomes in the later — 

On hwuche tyme so euer the mon of-Hiil<el' his mysdede — 

an almost perfect fourteener such as might have been written (were it 
not for the th letter) in the early sixteenth, or for the matter of that in 
the late nineteenth, century. And generally it may be laid down 
with the utmost confidence that the procession from rhythm to 
metre is astonishingly regular, and perhaps affords as good a test of 
date as any other. Here and there, of course, individual study or 
genius will make a start in front ; individual clumsiness or the un- 
favourable nature of surroundings will cause another to lag behind. 



56 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

But generally the procession is as regular as the growth of a tree ; 
and it cannot be said to be in the least internipted — it is at the 
most for a time paralleled and accompanied — by the curious alliter- 
ative revival which we shall have to notice in the fourteenth 
century. 

A considerable part of the literature of this time is only literature 
by courtesy, Homilies and Lives of Saints, with rare exceptions, 
being merely refashionings of previous matter for present consump- 
tion. These are found both in prose and in verse, the latter 
gradually taking the form either of the rudimentary "fourteener" 
just noticed, or of the octosyllabic couplet, which, as we have seen, 
crops up even in Layamon. The so-called Sawles IFardc,^ a prose 
homily, has a certain interest because in one of those fits of 
agglomeration which have been and will be noticed, and which 
alternate with segregation in the philological ague, it has been 
sought to unite its authorship with that not merely of the Ancren 
Rhvle, but of Halt MeidetiJiad^^ the Wooing of Our Lord^ and the 
prose lives of St. Margaret,"^ St. Juliana, ^ and St. Katharine. Identi- 
fications of this kind can at the best be conjectural, and are always 
exceedingly rash, but they may fairly be supposed to argue on the part 
of those who make them the apprehension of a certain literary unity 
in the styles as well as in the mere language of the different books. 
Even this is exposed to the objection that in matter which more than 
any other lends itself to the adoption of " common form," which is 
constantly based on similar Latin originals, and which must pre- 
sumably have been written in schools of conventual practice, even 
a great similarity is probable without an identity of authorship 
being fairly to be inferred ; while mere agreement in grammatical 
and dialectic forms is the very slenderest and most treacherous of 
clues. 

There is much more purely literary interest in a verse translation 
or paraphrase of the books of Genesis and Exodus? which appears to 

have been executed about the middle of the thirteenth 
^'exoJus"^ century, and which lias great attraction not merely for 

its extremely sharp contrast of language and form with 
those of the Citdmonian paraphrases, but for the intrinsic character 
of the form itself. Here is a passage : — 

For sextene ger Joseph was old 
Quanc he was into Egipte sold; 
He was Jacobes gunkeste sune, 



1 In full ed. Morris, O/il Eii^^/is/i Homilies (E.E.T.S.) ; part of oacli given 
in Morris-Skeat Specimens, vol. i. 

2 Ed. Cockayne, E.E.T.S. 3 Ed. Morris, E.l'l.T.S. 



CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 57 

Brictest of wasme and of witter vvunej^ 

If he sag hise brethere misfaren, 

His fader he it gan un-hillen and baren. 

Now it must be evident here to the most careless reader who 
has any ear that we have stumbled upon one of the most famous of 
English measures, the great CJiristabel metre itself, or in other 
words, the iambic dimeter with wide license of trisyllabic substitution, 
catalexis, and metrical truncation so as to interpose trochaic chords. 
The enormous influence of this (through Scott's hearing part of 
Christabel before it was published) has long been a commonplace 
of literary history ; and it has been also often pointed out, though 
less often, that it was only developed, not invented, by Coleridge, in- 
asmuch as it occurs in Spenser's The Oak and the Brej-e {Shep. Kal. 
Feb.), and in other places, including even Co>nus. But not much 
attention has been called - to its occurrence practically full-fledged, 
though not with all its tricks of flight 3'et learnt, in the middle of the 
thirteenth century. And it cannot, I think, be necessary to point out 
how vain are efforts to make out an Anglo-Saxon ancestry for it. 
Except on the very rarest occasions, and then in the most distant 
and halting fashion, there is not even an accidental resemblance to it 
in any Anglo-Saxon verse from Beowulf to Bninanb?irgh. And 
there could not be, for it depends for its unmatched combination of 
freedom and harmony on exactly the two effects which Anglo-Saxon 
poetry lacked — metrical, not rhythmical, cadence and final rhyme. 
Only the first could give the freedom without doggerel license ; only 
the second could give "time beat" — the warning bell which prevents 
that license from being overstepped at the same time that it gives 
harmony to the vei'se. 

A Bestiary,^ of the same date or thereabouts — in itself one of 
the numerous mediaeval renderings of the fantastic mystical zoology 
which was so popular, and which has already met us far earlier in 
the Whale and Panther of the Exeter Book — possesses 
interest of the same kind though rather less. This interest 
lies in the fact that it oscillates between unrhymed accentuation 
and rhymed metre ; for we shall almost invariably find (and it is 

1 " Brightest of form and of wise wont" (habits); gcr, of course =" year " ; 
guukcste = " youngest " ; sag = " saw " ; iDthillen = " \xx\huH" = " discover." I have 
taken the text from tlie Specimens as more accessible, and also because some of the 
MS. asperities are softened, but the whole poem ought to be read to justify the 
above remarks. 

■■^ In the E.E.T.S. edition the metre is noticed, briefly, by Professor Skeat. But 
no attention is drawn to it in the Specimens, and it has, I think, been generally 
ignored in literary histories. 

3 Ed. Wright, Reliquiae Antitjuue, i. 208 ; ed. Morris, Old English Miscellany, 
p. I. Some in Specimens. 



The Bestiary. 



58 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

surprising that poets like Campion and Milton centuries later failed 
to discern the' fact) that rhyme and metre are in modern languages 
almost indissolubly bound together — English blank verse being 
mainly a " sport," though as we shall see later, an extremely 
interesting and valuable sport. At one time in the Bestiary we find 
somewhat irregular and broken-down alliteration, not very dissimilar 
from the non-rhymed parts of Layamon. At another we come 
upon wandering and uncertainly octosyllabic couplets, fairly constant 
in their rhymes, but as " wobbling " in point of syllabic constitution 
as the nearly contemporary examples of the same metre that we find 
in Germany and Spain. Anon will come a series (evidently inspired 
by some hymn) of very respectable eights and sixes rhymed in 
quatrains, and a good deal better than Tate and Brady, but with the 
same tendency to sevens instead of sixes which we find in the un- 
rhymed Onnulmn, and which may be accounted for by the still over- 
inflected state of the language. And yet again tiie unrhymed couplet of 
the Ormidiiiu itself meets us to show the staggering state of the writer 
or writers. For even if — which would be rather improbable — the 
book were a composition from more hands than one, the absence of 
any prevailing metre would be equally noticeable ana equally striking 
by contrast, especially with the almost tyrannous predominance of the 
regular octosyllable in all but strictly lyrical work in Fiance at the 
same time. Most noteworthy of all perhaps is tlie fact that these 
quatrains or couplets are mixed, the writer sometimes, it would seem, 
being unable to hit upon rhyme, though he would if he could. 

Nor does the same fruitful source of interest fail in an earlier 

production of the sacred kind — the so-called Orison of oitr Lady,^ to 

which as early a date as 1210 is assigned. This is in couplets and 

very fairly rhymed, but the lines have not settled down 

The Orison 0/ -t^ anything like even length. They range from the 

our Lady. j a o ii.^j 

fourteeners and fifteeners of the Ormulutn and the Moral 
Ode to— and this is where the importance of the poem comes in — 
examples of no less famous a form than the decasyllable itself.^ It 
has always been matter of surprise that this famous form, the earliest 
staple of French, and in one way or another, as decasyllable or hen- 
decasyllable, making its appearance early in the other Romance lan- 
guages, should have been so late to appear in English. I do not 
think that a complete decasyllabic couplet can be found in the Orison 
— the writer's grip of his metre, or rather his conception of what he 
means to grip, is too loose for that. And indeed, though attempts 

1 Whole in Morris, Old English Homilies, i. 191 ; more than half in Specl- 
7nens. 

2 Cristes | milde | nioder | seynte | Marie — 
Al is I the heouen | e ful | of thin | e blisse. 



CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 59 

have been made to find couplets in Hampole, it is extremely doubtful 
whether they are not merely accidental in all cases before Chaucer — 
the tendency either to the short octosyllable, the long line halved, or 
the composite fourteener being apparendy irresistible. But that the 
decasyllabic should appear at all (as it does later in Langland's 
alliteration) is the important thing. There is no simile or metaphor 
that suits these metrical appearances so well as the old one of the 
coral island, which first makes uncertain show just awash, with a few 
points, and in the course of ages establishes itself as a complete and 
continuous reef or atoll. 

The metrical uncertainty of the Bestiary and the Orison displays 
itself also in the curious Proverbs of Alfred^ to which, in their 
present form, no older date than the middle of the thirteenth century 
is assigned, but which must be far older in substance, and which may 
not quite fancifully be connected with the King's Epheineris noticed 
above. They may be most conveniently taken in com- 
parison with the somewhat later, but not much later, ..///>f.^and 
Proverbs of Hendyng^- attributed to a mythical person Hendy?ig. 
of that name, son of the equally mythical " Marcolf," who in scores 
of different forms holds colloquy with Solomon in mediaeval writings. 
The same familiar saws make their appearance in both with little 
variation — "A fool's bolt is soon shot," "Spare rod and spoil child," 
etc. This has of itself a genuine literary interest, because these 
products of the wisdom of many and the wit of one, thus passing 
through all English literature, act as tie-rods to maintain its con- 
tinuity. ^ But the form has interest as well as the matter. The 
later or Hendyng proverbs are in regular six-lined stanzas of the so- 
called Romance form, rhymed aabaab. In those assigned to Alfred 
we have over again, but with a distinctly greater tendency toward 
the predominance of rhyme, the Layamon jumble of regular rhymed 
or even assonanced couplet, and of equally regular alliterated stave. 
Some of the sections, each introduced with a '• Thus quoth Alfred," 
are rhymed throughout in couplets of a somewhat staggering dimeter ; 
some show no rhyme at all ; and in some it emerges and sinks again 
after much the same fashion as in the Bestiary. In fact, the moral 
to be drawn from all these poems, even singly but much more to- 
gether, is that rhyme and metrical equivalence of verse, struggling 
still at the beginning of the thirteenth century, had by its middle got 

1 To be found, like the Bestiary, both in Reliquiae Antiguae, i. 170, and in An 
Old English Miscellany, two texts (102, 103, sq!). Part again in Specimens. 

2 Rel. Antiq. i. 109. Extracts will be found in the second part of Morris and 
Skeat's Specimens, where the work is dated I'zjz-iyij. 

3 So, I may note in passing, the pet Elizabethan antithesis of " Wit " and 
"Will" appears at this time in a short piece given by Morris, Old English 
Miscellany, p. 192. 



6o THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

so distinctly the better that everybody turned to rhyme, that most 
people tried to write pretty regular metrical verse, and that very fair 
success crowned both attempts. Such success was especially re- 
markable in the last poem of this period which will claim detailed 
notice, a poem which is at the same time one of the best. 

This is The Oivl and tJie Nightingale,^ a poem of some 2000 

lines in fairly regular octosyllabic couplets, which is attributed to 

one Nicholas de Guildford, who lived at Portesham in Dorset- 

.„, ^ , shire, and which cannot be much later than the middle 

J he Owl ^ , , . , ^ . . , 

and the oi the thirteenth century. The form of it is the very 
Nightingale, common mediaeval one of the lUbat, as it is called in- 
French— a metrical dispute between two persons or things, which 
may range from a mere exhibition of their several qualities, in- 
tended to instruct the reader and show the poet's learning, to a 
"flyting" of the kind popular much later in Scotland. The general 
scheme is, of course, a contest and conflict between " crabbed age and 
youth," between gravity and gaiety, but the Nightingale is tlie aggressor 
and the more violent in her language, while the poet seems rather to 
incline to the side of the Owl. Certainly the Nightingale indulges 
in the greater personality, and makes on the whole less ingenious 
use of her case. It is, for instance, a distinct hit of the Owl, when 
her rival has pleaded that she teaches priests to sing, and increases 
the joy of man, to retaliate that there are numerous countries where 
the Nightingale does not go at all, and that she had better make up 
for this by going and teaching the priests, in Ireland and Scotland, 
in Galloway and Scandinavia, to do their duty. And the bird of 
Pallas has also a good " flyte " on the moral side (one which she could 
have justified abundantly from French and Provenyal poetry) in his 
suggestion that the principal effect of the Nightingale's song is to 
make women false to their husbands, and to get them into various 
sorts of trouble. This passage contains an allusion which seems to 
tie the poem down to the reign of Henry III. 

On the whole, this is the best example of the octosyllabical 
couplet to be found before the fourteenth century. The poet (who, 
by the way, quotes "Alfred" repeatedly, and little else) occasionally 
commits the fault — specially unpleasing to modern English ears, 
but natural at his early date, and probably connected with the 

II use Wright's ed. for the Percy Society, 1843. The piece (of which there 
are large pieces in the Specimens) was printed earlier (1838) for the Roxburghe 
Club by Stevenson, and later (1868) at Krefeld by Stratmann, the compiler of the 
completest M. E. Lexicon. Wright's ed. contains some interesting shorter poems, 
perhaps by the same author, and tliese with others (but not the Choi) reappear in 
an Old English Miscellany. The last of the latter is a Love-Rune, a (religious) 
Love Song, assigned to Thomas of Halys, and apparently versified from part of the 
After en Riwle. 



CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 6i 

indifference of his French originals to identical rhymes — of making 
the same rhyme do for two successive couplets ; but this does not occur 
often enough to interfere seriously with harmony. His variations from 
eights to sevens are not more than the genius of the language specially 
allows. His style is easy and his poetical imagery and apparatus gen- 
erally, though comparatively simple, well at command, and by no means 
of a rude or rudimentary order. We cannot, of course, say that he may 
not have been directly indebted to a French original, for the theme 
is one which must almost certainly have tempted the tireless inge- 
nuity of the troubadours and trouveres of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries in France and Provence. But we have no direct original, 
and in such a case it is only fair to credit Nicholas) or whoever he 
was) with independence. It should be observed that the name occurs 
in the poem as that of the referee selected by the birds and their 
audience-arbiter, the Wren. He is very handsomely spoken of, and 
the bishops are reproached because he has only one •■' wonning " 
— and tithing, which has made some think that the author cannot 
have referred to himself. But this argument, which is a sound one 
at the date and in the circumstances of the Shephercfs Calendar^ has 
not much weight in reference to a "finder" of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, at which date and in which class men were by no means wont 
to be troubled with excessive modesty. Moreover, there is a not 
impossible touch of humour in the passages relating to " Maister 
Nichole " — 

Through [whose] mouth and through [whose] hand 

It is the better into Scotland ! 

It should be remarked also, before concluding, that in this poem, as in 
all others of the time, the language is by no means freely gallicised. 

At no long time in front of this period romances must have begun 
to be written in English, and three of not the least interesting that 
we have, Havelok, Horn, and Sir Trisirem, are allowed even by jealous 
literary chronologists to be probably older than the year 1300. But 
the advantage of treating the Anglo-French romance together is so 
great and obvious, that it will be better to relegate these to a future 
chapter. 1 

1 The fabliau of Dame Siriz (Wright's Anecdota Liter aria, 1844) , The Vox 
[Fox] and the Wolf (Reliquiae Antic/uae, ii. 272-8), an interesting and early 
English version of Reynard, and others, might be added. The Christabel varia- 
tion occurs in these also ; but Genesis and Exodus appears to be much the earliest 
and most considerable example thereof. 



CHAPTER III 

SECOND iMIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 

1 300-1 360 

Robert of Gloucester — Robert Manning — Lyrics — The Ayenbite of Inwyt — The 
Northern Psalter ^ — Manning — William of Shoreham — The Cursor Mtmdi — 
Hampole — Adam Davy — Laurence Minot — Cleanness and Patience — The 
Pearl 

The last quarter of the thirteenth century is not a very fruitful 
period of English literature — so far at least as attributions that can 
be called in any way certain, or even probable, are concerned. We 
have glanced at possible romances. Of other work we have, 
dating from the extreme end of the thirteenth century and the 
earlier half of the fourteenth, a very considerable body of theological 
literature of the old kind, exhibiting characteristics frequently of 
linguistic and occasionally of literary interest ; at least one named and 
known writer of such literature, Richard Rolle of Hampole, who, 
though his importance has, as usual, been exaggerated, is of some 
mark ; at least one individual religious poem, the Cursor Mimdt, 
which, though its authorship is unknown, is remarkable not merely 
for size ; two most interesting and important new developments — 
the verse-history of more or less contemporary events, and the 
accomplished lyric in the new prosody ; and (to mention only work 
of distinction) at the extreme close of the period, or a little beyond 
it, a group of companions of very remarkable poetical merit, which 
have been thought to be of common authorship, tlie Pearl, Cleanness, 
and Patience, to which some would add the very attractive alliterative 
romance of Gawain and the Greene Knight. This latter will be most 
conveniently dealt with later, the others had best be handled here. 
All four pieces were at any rate connected with a very curious literary 
phenomenon, the resurrection of alliterative verse, which had some 
good consequences, and but for Chaucer might have had many more 
bad ones. 

62 



SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 63 



The earliest of these works, or group of works, in point of time, 
and not the least interesting in literary history, if not of the first 
intrinsic literary merit, is the batch of verse-histories, of which Robert 
of Gloucester's is the oldest. This is dated about two years before 
the close of the thirteenth century, while Robert Manning, or Robert 
of Brunne, comes some thirty years later. 

Robert of Gloucester ^ is a very interesting person, and a much 
better poet than it has been the fashion to represent him, though his 
first object was not poetry, and though, had it been so, he was but ill- 
equipped. It is not known when lie was born, but he 
did not write, or finish writing, till quite the close of Qoucester 
the thirteenth century, though he had personal remem- 
brance of the civil wars in the latter part of Henry III.'s reign 
and carried his own chronicle to the year 1272. He was not 
superior to the odd craze which induced most of the historians of 
this time to begin with the Siege of Troy, and he abstracts Geoffrey 
of Monmouth for a considerable part of his book with that docility 
which, though it may seem singular in the transferred sense of the word, 
was universal as far as almost all his contemporaries were concerned. 
With Anglo-Saxon history he deals slightly, and despite his ardent 
English patriotism — his book opens with a vigorous panegyric of 
England, the first of a series extending to the present day (from which 
an anthology De Laiidibus Anglia might be made) — he deals very 
harshly with Harold Godwinson. From the Conquest onward he 
does his best to draw on French, Latin, and English sources alike, 
reinforcing them in the later years with personal recollections of 
reminiscences, as in the case of the Oxford town-and-gown row of 1263. 

Although, however, Robert is in many places agreeable to read 
for the story and for his spirited temper, yet the main interest in him 
for the literary historian is still connected with his form and vehicle. 
This is the long swinging verse, half-trochaic, half-anapaestic, which 
we have already watched in its development, as the new metrical 
prosody beat it out of the ancient alliterated and unmetrical stave, and 
which was to be ever improved and suppled from this date to tliat 
of Mr. Morris's Sigurd the Volsitng. This line may be said to have 
two normal varieties, towards which it unconsciously directs itself. 
Of one of these, Robert's first line, hardly altered — 

Enge I land is a | right good | land, I | ween of all | lands the | best — 

is a very fair average example, and the poet not unfrequently equals 
it. But he has also some inclination towards the other form, which 

1 First printed by Hearne, with Manning, etc., in 1724. I use the 1810 
reprint (4 vols.) of these. 



64 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



in its perfection is simply tlie iambic fourteener so mucli spoken of 
in tlie last chapter — 

By her | he had | a daugh | ter sweet | the goo | dy queen | ^ Maud | . 

But, as might be expected, he not merely oscillates between these two 
cadences, but frequently rolls or staggers into others — sometimes 
considerably less musical ; while he is by no means free from tlie 
tendency to cut the line so short that with a slight change in 
pronunciation it would become neither more nor less than a 
decasyllabic, as in — 

And took I him hos | tage good | at his | own will | 

where no doubt the contemporary value of some words would disguise 
the length. Nor is this the only possibility which his uncertain move- 
ment develops, for again elsewhere we have approaches to the pure 
anapxstic tetrameter, also to become a favourite metre later — 

An house | of reli | gion of ca | nons ywis | 

though in the same manner here the full syllabic value of " religion " 
would obscure for the time the cadence. The point has, however, 
been dwelt upon here because it is an interesting help towards the 
comprehension of the manner in which all the stock English metres 
resulted from the clash of the strict French syllabic prosody, of the 
Latin syllabic equivalence, and of the Anglo-Saxon tolerance of extra- 
metrical, or rather extra-rhythmical syllables. That the French deca- 
syllable itself helped the English analogue to emerge is perfectly true, 
but there is no need to regard the latter as a foreign importation. 

The peculiarity of this metre (which it is a sad mistake to regard 
as by any means the same as our hymn common measure, a strict 
iambic metre without trisyllabic liberties, and never shifting the foot 
to trochaic rliythm) is very closely reproduced in a large body of 
Lives of the Saints of about the same period, which accordingly good 
authorities have regarded as being also the work of Robert of 
Gloucester. Mr. W. H. Black, who edited one of them, that dealing 
with Becket, more than fifty years ago,^ was very positive on the 
subject, and the latest authorities ■^ seem to have no objection. The 
beautiful Celtic legend of .S7. Braudan ^ has also been edited from this 
collection, as well as others. It must, of course, be obvious that the 

1 Percy Society, 1845. 

2 Morris and Skeat {Specimens, ii. i) reprint selections from the Chrotiicle and 
the Life of St. Dunstan as Robert's. 

3 Ed. Wright, Percy Society, 1844. The whole collection has been issued by 
the E.E.r.S., ed. Horstmann. 



CHAP, in SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 65 

adoption of the form for things so popular as Saints' Lives both 
testifies to its own popularity and would help to confirm and spread 
this. And it is perhaps not rash to add that there are points in it 
which would rather encourage the relapse on alliteration which we 
shall have to notice at the end of this chapter. In the first place, the 
extreme looseness of the verse — almost the most mobile of all 
English forms — tends that way ; and in the second the great distance 
of the rhyme-safeguards from each other makes them more likely to 
be overpowered, if not overlooked. 

From this same point of view the interest of Robert's forty years later 
successor, Robert Manning, is well sustained, though in other respects 
it falls short. This second Robert, whom we shall meet again in this 
chapter, was a Gilbertine canon, and derived his surname 
from the place of his birth, Brunne or Bourn in Lincoln- tannin 
shire. The authorities are generous to him in the matter 
of life, supposing that it may have extended from about 1260 to 
about 1340, or even later; but this is mere guesswork. It seems 
that his history was not finished till 1338. Unlike Robert of 
Gloucester's, it was a translation, or rather, as all mediaeval translations 
are, an adaptation, of a single work, the chronicle written in French, but 
by an Englishman, Peter Langtoft, canon of Bridlington, with ampli- 
fications from Wace and other sources. Historically he has not 
much importance, nor can his work be said to equal the other 
Robert's in direct literary attraction.^ But for the study of the history 
of English metre it is very valuable. Langtoft had written in the 
ordinary measure of the later chansons de gcste, monorhymed laisscs 
of twelve-syllabled lines, and Manning was clearly under the im- 
pression that he must get as near to this as he could. In his 
prefatory remarks he employs the regular octosyllabic couplet, the 
earliest of all our metres ; but this would not have done for the body of 
the work. He accordingly, having none of his namesake's swing, con- 
tented himself with a very prosaic line, which at its best is the 
fourteener, at its worst an indefinite number of syllables which some 
might call a "verse of four accents" because of its rebelliousness to 
any more accomplished arrangement. 

It was about rhyme, however, that Robert Manning seems to have 
been most careful and troubled. Sometimes he is content to let 
these shambling lines of his rhyme in couplets. But ever and anon 
his conscience seems to prick him, and he eitlier adds middle rhyme 
or attempts the, in English almost hopeless, task of emulating the 
continued rhymes of his original. Of these he achieves sometimes 

1 It ought to be said that important authorities, Sir Frederick Madden and Dr. 
Furnivall, have thought better of Manning's poetical power, but chiefly, I think, 
as show n in Handlyng Synne. 



66 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



as many as a score, but always with a result equally cacophonous 
and lame. 

To those, however, who are not satisfied with merely formal interest, 
the next division to which we come will have far greater attraction, 
while to those who can appreciate both form and spirit it will have 
altogether exceptional charm. This division consists of the first 
blossoming of English lyric properly so called. The 
^""' famous Sii7ner is iciitnen in, the Cuckoo-Song long ago 
printed by Sir John Hawkins, and made popular by Ellis in his 
Specimens for more than a century past, has generally had, as observed 
above, the credit assigned to it of being the actually oldest piece 
of the kind, and though such attributions are always rather temerarious, 
there is no need to disturb this particular one if the date is not carried 
back too far. The poem is in very short lines and of a simple 
and almost rude structure, besides being more noticeable for its fresh 
and genuine observation of nature tlian for any very poetical spirit. 
Rhyme is quite established in it, but it may easily be of tlie thirteenth 
century, and perhaps as early as its middle. It is not, however, till 
the close thereof that we get any considerable collection of lyrics 
of great merit on profane subjects.^ This is the collection taken 
from the MS. known as 2253 Harl., preserved in the British Museum. 
Its prettiest piece. Alison, was also printed by Ellis, whose taste in 
these matters, though just a little touched with eighteenth-century 
Voltairianism, was excellent ; but the whole collection did not appear 
till Thomas Wright, that benefactor of our literature, printed it for 
the Percy Society on ist March, 1842, a particularity of date which 
may be pardoned in consideration of the exceptional charm of the 
work and of its importance in English literary history. For though 
there must have been other poems of the kind written, and though 
we actually have a few, they have not been collected as they should 
have been into a corpus, and the total does not appear to be very 
large. 

It is obvious, though it is not the less important for its obvious- 
ness, that these poems, like all the lyrical work of Europe during the 
thirteenth century, were composed not in slavish imitation, but in 
generous yet none the less distinct following, of the troubadours of 
Provence and the trouvcres of Northern France."^ In the course 
probably of the twelfth century, certainly by its end, these poets' had 

1 The shortei- poems mentioned in the last chapter (p. 60, note i) must not 
he forgotten, but they are almost entirely sacred. At the same time, as the 
maiden asked the author of A Love Rune for an actual love-song, love-songs must 
have been written. 

■•2 The direct influence of Provence was probably very small. But it has been 
sometimes .nssumcd on the strength of the marriage of Henry III. 



CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 67 

almost exhausted the possible combinations of lyric so far as strictly 
syllabic prosody went, and within the limitations of dissyllabic feet 
which the structure of both languages imposed. There are vestiges 
of trisyllabic arrangement in Northern French, but they disappear 
early. The English minstrel and the German minnesinger took 
these models and adapted them, but in each case gave more or less 
scope to the irrepressible craving of Teutonic lips and ears for the 
triple movement. 

This Romance influence is plainly evidenced in the collection 
before us by the very fact of its being bilingual. Of the forty-two 
pieces printed by Wright, the three first and others later are in 
French. But the fourth, beginning 

Middelerd for mon is made, 

is in English, and at once introduces us to a complete and distinctly 
elaborate lyrical arrangement. There is still, as in almost all Middle 
English poetry — even in Chaucer himself — a great deal of alliteration, 
but it has no influence on the actual form. This consists of an 
eleven-line stanza, which proceeds as far as the octave in regular 
''eights," admitting catalexis, rhymed abababab, and completes itself 
with a six, eight, six coda or "bob " rhymed cbc. The next has ten-lined 
stanzas monorhymed in the octave, which consists of heavily alliterated 
" four-accent " doggerel tipped with a decasyllabic couplet differently 
rhymed, and approaching more closely to a regular decasyllabic. 
This is not a good piece, but the next, the Alisoji, which is, or ought 
to be, as famous as Siuiier is iaivicn in, is quite delightful — the first 
perfectly delightful thing in English poetry. The lovely intertwined 
music of its twelve-lined stanzas, composed of an eight and six 
quatrain, an eight triplet, a six, another eight triplet, and another six, 
rhymed ababbbcdddc, is not too good for the simple but fervid passion 
and the charming imagery of the piece. It is no exaggeration to say 
.that the promise of Donne and Herrick, of Burns and Shelley, is in 
Alison. 

A careful study of the various metres of these poems will show 
that, in spite of occasional lapses from strict metrical propriety, there 
was practically no secret of English prosody which was not at least 
ready to be unlocked for English poets. Even their greatest license, 
the shrinkage of the octosyllable to seven or even six, which is so 
freely allowed, had this of merit in it, that it served as an additional 
safeguard against the cast-iron syllabic uniformity of their Romance 
models, which would have fatally hampered the varied music of 
English. There is as yet less tendency to extend, and the influence 
of the same models as yet checks anapaestic movement. But even 



68 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

this appears, and it was certain to be encouraged by that beneficent 
process of regular dropping of inflections, and the final d in particular, 
which went on without cessation till the fifteenth century. When one 
man gave a word the value of three syllables and another that of two, 
it was practically impossible that an absolute mould like that of a 
Latin Alcaic, or a French scheme of any sort, should be adopted. 
Nor is the fact that in these poems we occasionally find polyglot 
French or Latin lines in alternation with English to be regarded 
as a matter of little consequence. For it cannot be too often repeated 
that what English wanted now was exactly that " madman to mix 
it" who, according to the proverb (of Spanish origin, I think), is 
required to make a good salad. The three tongues, with their 
different cadences, their different structure, their different prosodic 
ideals, could not be shaken up against each other too much in order 
to produce that matchless blend the English poetic language, with 
its unequalled combination of freedom and order, and its inexhaustible 
resources of varied melody. 

The most noticeable metre, though not the best, that emerges 
from this pleasant welter of experiment is that romance sestet or 
douzain, as the case may be, which, as we shall see in the next 
chapter, by degrees rivalled, and again by other degrees even out- 
did, the regular octosyllabic couplet as the favourite vehicle of narrative 
poetry. Its great drawback, the danger of a sing-song monotony, 
which Chaucer brought out in the memorable but rather unfair 
burlesque of S/r T/io/>as, appears at once. But English literature 
owes it a distinct debt. If it is more exposed to this danger, it is 
less exposed to that of undistinguished fluency than the couplet, the 
"ungirt" character of which did much harm to French poetry and 
(till Chaucer showed how it might be strengthened and varied) to 
English. And it provided what was now specially wanted, a go-cart 
of fairly accomplished but not in the least difficult metrical stanza 
in which the growing language could practise itself. The earlier 
stages of no literature can be properly understood unless this function 
of exercise is apprehended. And such stages have the immense and 
untiring attraction of future, of promise, joined to that, more delicate 
but even more poignant, of antiquity and of the past.^ 

Although, as has been pointed out, the sacred division of this 
literature forms much the larger part in bulk, it is, for reasons already 
also indicated, of less literary importance than the profane. Linguis- 
tically, however, it helps very largely to build the bridge over what 
would be otherwise in most cases the unbridged gulf between the 

1 Four of the best of these pieces, including Alison and the only less charming 
Lenten is come loith love to town, will be found in Morris and Skeat's Speci- 
tnens. 



CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 69 

Anglo-Saxon of the eleventh century and the accomplished Middle 
English of the fourteenth ; and in so far as it is in verse, it supplies 
many useful links and tell-tales in that surpassingly interesting 
examination of prosodic change which, as has been said, really 
constitutes, for literature, the chief attraction of this period in 
English. 

Of this attraction the prose part of this division of literature is 
necessarily divested, and its principal monument, the Ayenbite of 
Inwyt 1 of Dan Michel of Northgate (a translation from the same 
treatise, the Somvie des Vices et des Vertiis of a French 
monk named Laurence, which afterwards served as the ^ ^^/- /;^^,'l,/ 
stuff of Chaucer's ParsotCs Tale), is, with some sermons 
by the same author, of little or no interest as literature. Indeed 
it is almost the worst possible even of translations, executed with no 
intelligence, and simply beaten out, word for often mistaken word. Its 
quaint Kentish dialect, far more uncouth than that of much earlier 
work, and surprisingly so when we remember that it was probably 
written as late as the year (1340) of Chaucer's probable birth, consti- 
tutes an attraction for the philologist. With its s's for j-'s and other 
peculiarities, it suggests the original of the kind of composite patois, 
now chiefly suggesting to us that of the extreme south-west, which we 
find in Shakespeare and in other literary English up to the present 
century. Nor is the contemporary Northern prose ascribed to Ham- 
pole or his disciples (of whom more infra) without a certain interest 
of curiosity, while it is distinctly less archaic and more literary than 
the Ayenbite. But in strictness there is no English prose that really 
deserves much attention from the literary point of view until the 
latter half of the fourteenth century. " Let the Ancren Riwle be 
saved alone by its flavour," as Saint-Evremond says of the snipe 
among brown meats. 

With verse — still, as always in the Middle Ages, the maid-of-all- 
work of literature — the case is different. The verse Homilies and 
Lives of Saints steadily continue, and furnish us from time to time 
with fresh examples of the manner in which the ordinary versifier 
handled his tools. Of much greater interest is a certain Metrical 
Version of the Psalms - in Yorkshire or Northumbrian dialect, which 
is sometimes stated to be of the thirteenth century, but which the 
devotees of Hampole assign to their favourite, in which case it would 

1 Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S. The eccentric-looking title only requires a minute's 
consideration to explain itself as the "again-biting" ( = "re-morse," cf. Pecock's 
vocabulary in Book iv. infra) of inner wit ( = conscience). 

2 First published by the Surtees Society in 1843 '• to be found in vol. ii. pp. 
129-273, of Dr. Horstmann's great Hampolian Miscellany, London, 1896. Some 
examples in Specimens. 



70 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



be thirty or forty years younger at least. The present writer has no 
pretensions to decide on linguistic grounds, and is not of the Ham- 
pole fanatics. But the metrical arrangement of the 
^'^Psahen^'^" Psaltcr Certainly seems to favour rather the later than the 
earlier date, and in any case to argue a writer distinctly 
above the common in literary and poetical gifts. The metre is the 
octosyllable, seldom or never shortened to less than sevens, but often 
extended into that form which I have taken to be the probable 
original of the heroic couplet. The slight harshness (not going beyond 
an agreeable astringency) of the Northern dialect is compatible with, 
and here attains, a considerable dignity ; the feeble fluency which is 
the curse of the octosyllable couplet seldom or never appears ; the 
expletives which are almost a greater curse not merely of the couplet 
but of stanza-writing at this time, and from which even Chaucer did 
not entirely free himself, are mainly absent ; and the phrase and 
arrangement possess that grave stateliness which is so suitable to 
religious poetry, and which, except in the late sixteenth and early 
seventeenth centuries, it has too often lacked. 

There is not so much dignity, though there is rather more 

freedom and engagingness, in the Handling Sin ^ of Robert Manning, 

already mentioned as a historian. There is much significance for 

literary history in the fact that this, like Manning's secular 

Manning. , ' . ,t- i ir 

work, was a translation from the trencii work oi an 
English predecessor, in this case the Manuel des Pcchcs of William 
of Waddington. This work, containing, after homiletic fashion, 
stories of the pious fabliau kind, gave some practice in tale-telling, 
and is not unimportant among the ancestry of Chaucer. Contem- 
porary with Manning, but in the South not the North, was another 
named writer of religious verse, William of Shoreham (the Kentish 
not the Sussex Shoreham), who lived and wrote in the first quarter of 
the fourteenth century at Leeds and Chart Sutton, in the district 
between Maidstone and Canterbury. Shoreham ''- dealt in verse with 
the Sacraments, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Ten Commandments, the 
service of Our Lady, and even the higher questions of theology, such 
as immortality and the existence of God. The curious 
Shoreh^ml^ thing — though it would not have seemed curious to any- 
body then — is the selection of lyric metres for such 
subjects. Thus, for instance, the Poem on Baptism, which is the 
most easily accessible of his works, being given in Morris and Skeat's 
Selections, is couched in a seven-line stanza, rhymed xaxabxb, in 
which X stands for unrhymed lines of ad libitum ending. And the 
unsuitableness of the form to modern eyes and ears is completed by 

1 Ed. Furnivall for the Roxburghe Club, 1862. 

2 Ed. Wright for the Percy Society, 1849. 



CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 71 

the fact that while the first quatrain is of Oniiulum eights and sevens, 
and the last couplet of the same, the fifth line is a " bob " or short 
catch of two or three syllables only. But there was nothing incon- 
gruous in this then to the reader or hearer, while the invincible 
patience of the mediseval scriptoriiaii made it no doubt easy enough 
to the writer.^ 

We have, as has been said, for this time a fair supply of 
verse homilies, usually in octosyllables ; but by far the most interesting 
verse divinity of the period is contained in the huge poem or collection 
called the Cursor Mundir 

This enormous, but by no means tedious, production has been 
put at the service of every reader by the more than mediaeval 
diligence of the late Dr. Morris, in four parallel texts 
exhibitino: different forms of dialect and substance, with ^ '^^l, ,. 

* ' Cursor aluitai. 

appendices containing parts of others. The longest ver- 
sion just falls short of 30,000 lines, and the total in all forms cannot 
be much below five times this amount. 

The poem, however, is of real interest and value. The author, who 
writes in octosyllabic couplets of considerable ease and spirit, begins 
by acknowledging the general desire for rhymes and romances of 
Alexander, of Troy, of Arthur, of Sir Isumbras and Sir Amadas, and 
of Cliarlemagne, most of which deal with earthly \o\&. But earthly 
love fails, the love of Our Lady (in whose honour he writes his book) 
dies not. He intends to tell the whole of the Bible history — 

Into Inglis tong to rede, 

For the love of Inglis lede (people) — 

and he does so. 

But the way in which he does it is the true medijeval divagation. 
Not merely does he dilate on such incidents as please him with 
perfect freedom ; not merely does he comment on them in the 
homiletic manner, letting the narrative stand still, but in the 
arbitrary, uncritical, to us now inconceivable, but always charming, 
fashion of the time, he incorporates with the Scriptural narrative 
itself any fragments of hagiology, any traditional stories — sometimes 
of a more or less mundane character — and any, it may be, inventions 
of his own, that come into his head. The fall of the angels, the 
Creation, the loss of Paradise, are expanded with rather less than the 
amplifications usual in these cases, until we come to that deliglitful 
legend, the Story of the Three Trees, which plays such an important 

1 The Athanasian Creed may be found paraphrased in sixains of eights and 
fours at p. 139 of Wright's edition. 

2 Ed. Morris (E.E. T.S.), in seven parts. 



72 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

part in the earlier stages of the Arthurian cycle. Afterwards, we 
pass few of the Biblical data without finding them enriched by fresh 
details, as that Lamech's daughter Noema was the first " webster," 
and that man became carnivorous after the Deluge only, because the 
earth had so much of the goodness washed out of it by the water that 
its fruit was not strong enotigh to support man, whose own constitution 
was likewise debilitated. 

Among the pains least lost upon this interesting book, those 
spent upon the classification of its materials may perhaps be 
counted. Much seems to have been taken from the History of 
Petrus Comestor in the twelfth century, something from poems of 
Wace, who, as we have seen, was much in the hands of English 
writers, together with a good deal from Grostete's Castle of Love, the 
apocryphal Gospels of Matthew and Nicodemus, and the works of 
Isidore of Seville. The fact is that, at first or second hand, the 
books at the disposal of an ordinary mediaeval writer were pretty 
constant ; and the frequent reappearance of the same or similar 
legends is not at all difficult to account for. 

The important thing, however, in this as in all cases, is not the 
information which was at a writer's disposal, but the use he makes of 
it. The author of the Cursor Muiidi — 

The l)est l)ook of all, 

"The Coui-se of the World" men do it call — 

(as one enthusiastic copyist prefaces it) — knew very well indeed how 
■to use his materials. Long as the book is, and familiar as is the 
main substance, if not the occasional settings-off, it can be read with 
ease and pleasure from beginning to end by any one who has time, 
and can be dipped into with satisfaction by those who have not. 
The Cotton version is perhaps, on the whole, the best to read, 
though there is not very much difference. The satisfaction comes 
from the easy but not at all slipshod way in which the writer manages 
his metre, the simple but by no means contemptible art with which 
he mi.xes and varies his materials, and the shrewd but kindly sense 
of his comments and observations. In speaking of the destruction 
of tlie Cities of the Plains — a subject generally exciting to medixval 
imagination — he cannot rise to the indignant passion of the later 
poem called Cleanness {%nde hi/ra), but he acquits himself very well, 
a.nd never falls into the falsetto of moral indignation. The "Three 
Trees " story above referred to is told very effectively ; and the Life 
of Christ, varied and heightened as it is by the additions from 
apocryphal story, makes a religious romance of high merit. He is 
proverbial without being over-sententious, good in description with- 



SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 73 



out descending to too much detail (an excellence rare in mediceval 
times, perhaps not common in any) ; he has throughout his immense 
narrative a distinct sense of proportion. It is really a pity that we 
do not know his name, for if not exactly a great man or a genius, he 
must certainly have been a person of no ordinary ability. 

Yet in the ignorance of the name of an author there is a certain 
consolation, inasmuch as he is less likely to be made the theme of 
uncritical criticism. This latter has been the lot of the one named 
author of importance who falls to be noticed in this chapter, Richard 
Rolle of Hampole, the author certainly of the Sti)imbts 
Coiiscioitiae or Prick of Consa'cncc, the author, more or 
less probably, of a consideraljle number of other works both in 
Latin and English, and the reputed author of many more still. 
Rolle is the first Middle English author of whom we have anything 
approacliing to a full biographical account (we have even a portrait 
of him which may be authentic), and his history as told by himself is 
certainly not uninteresting. He must have been born about the 
meeting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at Thornton, in 
the North Riding of Yorkshire, not far from Pickering ; his death is 
set by the author of his Viia, with more exactness, at 29th September 
1349. It will have been observed from one or two scattered notices 
already, that the literary effacement of the North, which had been 
begun by the Danish fury in the ninth century, and had been renewed 
by the devastations of the Conqueror and the Scottish wars in the 
eleventh and twelfth, had shown signs of ceasing, and Richard Rolle 
seems to have had every advantage of education. His father, 
William, was a friend of Sir John Dalton, and may have been 
connected with the great family of Neville. At any rate Richard, 
after some home instruction, was sent to Oxford by Thomas Neville, 
Archdeacon of Durham. In the second decade of the fourteenth 
century there were no colleges but Merton, Balliol, Exeter, and 
University, nor does there seem to be any record of Rolle's con- 
nection with any of these. But the University itself was at the 
height of its vogue : halls and hostels were innumerable. Richard 
appears to have become fairly competent in the scholastic philosopliy 
which was the chief study of the place, but, like other devotional 
mystics, to have mistrusted merely intellectual teaching, and is said 
to have left Oxford and returned to Yorkshire in his nineteenth year, 
determined to adopt the life of a hermit, 7iot •' unholy of works," as 
Langland was to- put it a generation later. The way in which, still to 
borrow from his successor, he "shope him a shroud" was slightly 
grotesque, for he borrowed two of his sister's gowns, a grey and a 
white one, cut off the grey sleeves, then put on the white gown first 
and the grey over it, completed his uniform with one of his 



74 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE hook ll 

father's hoods (black, it may be presumed), and ran away. It is not 
surprising to hear that his injured sister thought him mad, and cried 
out that he was so. He had Icnown the young Daltons at Oxford, 
and this or some other reason induced him to make for their father's 
estate, supposed to be near Thirsk (an easy day's journey from 
Pickering), where he appeared at church, and entered the Daltons' 
pew. He was recognised, and allowed first to sing, then to preach — 
an illustration of the easygoing ways of that mediaeval Christianity 
which has been represented by and to the ignorant as a tyrannical 
and hidebound system of ceremonial. After he had been for a time an 
almost unwilling guest of the Daltons, the father gave him a cell, an 
allowance, and, with the proper dress, the recognised status of a 
hermit. 

These details have been given because, with the exception of the 
Caedmon story, they are almost the first fragments of literary 
biography in English. The accounts of the remainder of Richard's 
life are less picturesque. He remained for some years in the 
hermitage which Sir John Dalton had given him, attaining at last 
complete "conversion," and it would appear, converting others, 
sometimes travelling to do so. From the Thirsk hermitage he seems 
to have transferred himself to one in the Richmondshire district of his 
native Riding. We hear something of his friends here, especially an 
anchoress named Margaret Kirkby. But at last he made another move 
to Hampole, near Doncaster, in the extreme south of the county, 
and abode there for the rest of his life in the neighbourhood of a Cister- 
cian nunnery, where he seems to have had disciples. He may have 
died of the first outbreak of the Black Death, which coincided with the 
date above given, and his sepulchre, which was carefully tended by the 
nuns, became famous for miracles. 

The works of Hampole ^ are, as has been said, both Latin and 
English. The former do not directly concern us, but it is notice- 
able that the alliteration of which we shall presently hear so much is 
very obvious in them as well as in the English. They also contain 
perhaps the clearest exhibitions of his .religious opinions. These 
centred round that mystical clinging to Divine Love which was the 
frequent, and no doubt the natural, reaction from the intense but 
hard intellectuality of scholasticism. Although Hampole has all the 
mediaeval terror of the " soft mystery " of woman's love, though he 
cannot reach the noble directness and passionate sanity of the author 
ot Cleanness, he had an odd aversion to " rules," to the regular 

1 The Prick of Conscience was edited by Morris for the Philological .Society 
(1863). The E.E.T.S. added some English Prose Treatises (ed. Perry). Dr. 
Horstmann's Hamiiolian Thesaurus above referred to is entitled Yorkshire 
Writers, 2 vols., London, 1895-96. 



CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 75 

monkish institutions, which explains, or at any rate is a very early 
symptom of, the deterioration of monarchisni apparent in England. 

His principles also appear in his English works, but it is not 
with his principles that we are here concerned. The study of him 
would have been facilitated if his latest, most extensive, and most 
enthusiastic editor, Dr. Horstmann, had indulged his readers with the 
usual compHment of a table of contents, the absence of which is at 
all times troublesome, but positively bewildering in the case of a 
thousand large pages of small print, arranged, as far as the verse is 
concerned, in double columns, and consisting of scores and hundreds 
of separate pieces of all lengths. This edition, moreover, does not 
contain the Prick of Conscience, Hampole's chief work. This is 
a poem containing nearly 10,000 lines, dealing with the Life of Man, 
its uncertainty, and the Four Last Things. The matter has a sort of 
shuddering intensity which is very noticeable, and which sometimes 
gives direct picturesque force. The form is the octosyllabic couplet 
with distinct trisyllabic admixture in the Ckristabel direction. It has 
been pointed out already that this scheme constantly tends towards 
something that may be indifferently scanned as a '• four-accent " 
verse with trisyllabic sections and a heroic of five iambs. Such 
things, e.g. — 

The b(o)ugh | es are | the ar | mes with | the handes 
And the | legges | with the | fete | that standes | 

are, or are like, heroic couplets, and accordingly it has not been very 
unusual to claim for Hampole the use, or even by a singular want of 
understanding of the facts the invention, of the metre before Chaucer. 
This is uncritical. . 

His prose treatises contain nothing ver}^ remarkable as literature, 
though they may, with care, be taken as further stages in the chain 
which leads from the Ancren Riiule to Chaucer's Parson''s Talc. 
But his minor poems, if they be his, have much more merit, and excel 
in this respect the Prick of Conscience itself. They are all sacred ; 
but they show that the " soft mystery " of human love was not 
absent from, and indeed had probably, for ill or good, inspired 
Hampole's Love Divine. To say, as a too ardent editor has said, 
that their beauty and melody have never been surpassed, is unlucky ; 
this is the kind of thing which brings discredit upon literary history 
and hopelessly mars its usefulness. But 

Unkinde man, give kepe til me, 
and 

Lo leman sweet, now may thou see, 



76 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

have the " unction " of our most successful hymn-writers, and certainly 
the poem beginning — 

My treuest treasure so traitorly taken, 
So bitterly bounden with bytand band(e)s, 
How soon of thy servants wast thou forsaken, 
And loathly for my life hurled with their hand(e)s! 

has a rhythm which is no common one, and which curiously reminds 
us of another Northumbrian poet 500 years later than Hampole — that 
is to say, of Mr. Swinburne.^ 

Nor can any one of these canticles of Divine Love, according to 
Richard Hampole, be spoken of otherwise than with admiration, while 
of the remaining pieces of verse attributed to him most have a 
certain individuality of form or spirit or both. But for the attribution 
to him of the revival of strictly alliterative verse there is little if any 
more warrant than for the ascription to him of the invention of the 
heroic. We can at the most (and also at the least) allow that this 
revival was a very reasonable consequence of the increased stimulus 
to literary composition in the North — always fonder of alliterative 
rhythm, and more rebel to strict metrical ways, than the South — of 
which he certainly was one of the lights and leaders. 

Two other named writers, one a little earlier, one a little later 
than Hampole, have obtained representation in English literary 
history, though they are decidedly less interesting, even when we 
take the hermit who robbed his sister of her gowns somewhat less 
seriously than he has sometimes been taken. The first of these, 
Adam Davy, occupied the rather mysterious office of 
Adam Davy. ;. jyj^,.j.|^^i ^f Stratford-atte-Bowe " about the year 1312, 
and no doubt spoke good French of the local pattern to the persons 
whom he marshalled. He happened, while many worthier writers 
escaped it, to attract the attention of Warton, who not merely attrib- 
uted to him divers sacred poems found in the same manuscript, but 
also the excellent romance of Alexander, which is probably earlier, and 
certainly by a much better writer. Davy's undoubted work consists 
of Visions of Edward II., which have been re-edited for the Early 
English Text Society by Dr. Furnivall. 

Laurence Minot had a likelier sul^ject than Adam Davy, inasmuch 

1 Swallow my sister, O sister swallow, 
How can thy heart be full of the spring ? 

Itylus. 

and the great stanza of the Triumph of Time. The final es of Hampole's 
alternate lines would soon have dropped. There is no other weak ending. Cf. 
also the pretty lines of Eve in the second Coventry Play, "Alas! that ever the 
speech was spoken." 



SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 77 



as he celebrated not Edward II., but Edward III. in his earlier 
glories. His subsequent fortune has been correspondent, for he 
has had the honour, most unusual for a Middle English 
poet even of higher rank than himself, of being four ^MTnot" 
times edited, and five times printed in full — by Ritson 
in 1795 and 1825, by Mr. Wright in his Record Office Political Poems, 
by Dr. Scholle in a German periodical, and by Mr. Joseph Hall for 
the Clarendon Press. The fact is the best possible evidence of the 
superiority of subject to form as means of gaining general atten- 
tion. Minot, who wrote in 1352, who seems to have been a 
Northerner from his dialect, but of whom we know nothing more, is a 
fair, but no more than a fair, specimen of the English trouvere-of-all- 
work of the period. His subjects are : Halidon Hill ; the capture of 
Berwick, which he takes as an avenging of Bannockburn ; the entry 
of Edward, our comely king, into Brabant ; the battle in the Swin ; 
the leaguer at Tournay ; the march to Calais ; Crecy and the battle 
there ; the siege of Calais ; Neville's Cross ; the sea-fight with the 
Spaniards ; and the taking of Guines. 

The forms of the poems that compose this cycle of the deeds of 
Edward — for that is what, with all its formal variety, it comes to — 
are various. Halidon is told in octave eights admitting catalexis, 
rhymed alternately with a title couplet which is found in all the 
poems and a final quatrain. The Berwick sack is in sixains rhymed 
aaaabb, the lines hovering between anapaestic fours and iambic 
fives as so often noted ; the entry into Brabant in octosyllabic 
couplets followed by romance sixains 886886 rhymed aabaab\ the 
battle of the Swin or Sluys in the above hovering couplets ; Tournay 
in octaves of sixes, to the three last of which " bobs " and couplets are 
added, making the Tristrein stanza (jiide infra') ; Crecy in octaves like 
Halidon with a couplet prologue ; Calais in similar staves without 
prologue ; Neville's Cross in long sixteen-lined stanzas of very short 
lines, which perhaps should be octaves of longer lines ; the Spaniards 
in twelves of the same kind, and the Castle of Guines in the same. 

These poems have historical and patriotic interest 1 in no small 
degree ; but for literature their chief value is perhaps the way in 

1 Their patriotism, as is not unnatural or uncommon, becomes a little abusive 
now and then. It may perhaps be usefully observed in connection with them 
that the employment of the vernacular for political satire, etc., is a sure gauge 
of its literary standing. In Wright's first collection of Political Songs for the 
Camden Society in 1839 — a collection extending from the reign of John to that of 
Edward II. — not one of the four pieces for John's reign is English, only one of 
the fifteen for Henry III.'s, but nearly half (eight out of seventeen) of those 
for the Edwards. In his later and much larger collection from Edward III. 
to Ricliard III. for the Rolls Series (2 vols. 1859-1861) any language save 
English becomes more and more the exception. 



78 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

which they show that a fairly sufficient and satisfactory medium, a 
ready-made poetic diction and cadence, was now at last at the' dis- 
posal of the verse-writer. There is nothing in Alinot's poems, 
though some have spirit, especially the Neville's Cross piece, and 
that on the naval victory over tiie Spaniards, with its apostrophe to 
the 

Boy with the black beard ! 

that can be said to show any very special or peculiar poetical talents 
in the author. He is given to expletives, he seldom or never 
succeeds in giving us a distinct visual picture ; his very variety of 
metre, etc., looks more like the absence of any distinct grasp and 
command of one form than like a sense of general mastery. 
But, as has hardly been the case for three hundred years and more, 
he has a fairly settled tongue and a generally accepted prosody, 
with its peculiarities of lilt and swing all ready to his hands ; and 
he manages to make very tolerably good use of them. Indeed, 
though it may seem rather ungracious, it is not impossible to say 
that his chief use in literature proper is that he explains Chaucer — 
shows how the tools were ready for the workman. 

Last in this chapter falls to be noticed a very remarkable group 
of poems, which, with another reserved for the Romance division, 
have been attributed to a single author by their editors, who have 
also in some cases indulged in much hypothesis as to that author's 
identity. As in all cases, the reader is here simply referred to the 
discussions in question on the latter point. As to the former, 1 should 
be disposed to admit as extremely probable the common authorship 
of Patience, Cleanness, and The Pearl?- Gawain and the 
''^'^PatilncT^ Cr^^;/^ Knight {vide chap, v.) seems to me to be much more 
dubiously their brother ; for the fact of their being found 
in the same MS. is really no argument at all, considering the almost 
invariable mediitval habit of transcribing, straight on, the most hetero- 
geneous and unconnected work. And it is also very possible to 
allow too much weight to the alleged linguistic resemblances. 
But it is not impossible that the four poems may have had a 
common writer, and it is certain that all are much above the average 
in merit. 

In the three that are to be noticed in this place, the alliterative 
reaction, which has been already referred to, shows itself (as it does 
also in the Greene Knight) very strongly, though in differing measure 
and degree. Cleanness and Patience, two poems, the first of 
rather over 1800 lines, the other of rather over 500, each of 

^ Early English Alliterative Poems, ed. Morris (E.E.T.S.), [T/iel Pearl 
separately edited by I. Gollancz, London, 1891. 



CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 79 

which begins with the title-word, are written in alliterative blank 
verse, observing for the most jjart the old rule of two alliterations in 
the first section and one in the second, very closely though not rigidly 
equivalent in syllabic length, precise in the middle pause, and though 
not metrical, yet exhibiting a general set of rhythm towards anapaestic 
cadence in the first half, and trochaic in the second. This, in fact, 
was the general scheme of the new alliteration at its best time, as 
here and in Langland. Later, especially in Dunbar and Douglas, 
the alliteration is exaggerated, and the lines lengthened accordingly. 
The Pearly on the other hand, though very strongly alliterated, does 
not depend on alliteration for its system of scansion, but is in twelve- 
lined octosyllabic stanzas rhymed ababababbcbc, these stanzas being 
further grouped in divisions generally of five each, the last line of 
each stanza in the group being a sort of refrain, which is more or 
less repeated throughout. The characteristics of matter and spirit 
are more uniform. All three poems are pervaded by a singular and 
very impressive mixture of devotional feeling, with poetical apprecia- 
tion of things mundane as well, and by a solemn melody rare in 
earlier verse. In Cleanness the mediaeval worship of purity, enforced 
by vigorous paraphrases and commentaries on the Parable of the 
Marriage Feast, the Fall of the Angels, the Deluge, the Destruction 
of Sodom, the Incarnation, and the story of Nebuchadnezzar and 
Belshazzar, is yet entirely free from the almost insane exaltation of 
virginity in and for itself which is so common. There is no nobler or 
more passionate appreciation of the delights of lawful love in English 
poetry than a passage in Jehovah's denunciation of Sodom to 
Abraham — Milton's famous apostrophe is a coarse and diffuse example 
of rhetorical commonplace in comparison — and the whole poem, 
though quaint now and then, is full of sombre energy, mixed, as in the 
destruction of Babylon and of the fire from Heaven, with description 
of great power. Patience has an apparently less inspiring subject ; 
but the story of Jonah, with which the poet chiefly fills it, gives him 
good opportunities of which he avails himself well. The storm in 
particular is very good. It must no doubt be admitted that the 
slightly grotesque effect of continuous and regular alliteration, and the 
way in which it compels even poets very fertile in resource to choose 
the wrong word instead of the right for the mere sake of an initial 
letter, receive some illustration here. But the result is by no means 
fatal. 

As a whole, however, The Pearl is undoubtedly the pearl of the 
three. As too often happens, the well-mentioned and very amiable 
partiality of its latest editor has set some against it ; but 
this is always indefensible. It need only be read — and 
it is by no means difficult to read — to show its real beauty. Thei;e 



8o THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

can be no reasonable doubt that it describes the loss of a daughter, 
l^robably in early age, who may very likely have borne the actual 
name of Margaret, beloved by the Middle Age because of the charm- 
ing and popular legend of the patroness saint, because of its own 
harmonious sound, and because of the endless plays on the meanings 
*' pearl" and "daisy " which it suggested.^ This 

Pearl pleasant to princes' pay — 
(the first line) — this 

Privy pearl withouten spot — 

which, with slight changes, is the refrain of the first group — is first 
dealt with as a gem richly set, but dropped by the owner on the 
ground. The father (probably) visits the spot, almost avowedly a 
grave, and, falling asleep of pure sorrow, is carried oflF to a strange 
region. Following a stream he sees a white-clad maiden, whom he 
at first partly, and then seeing a mighty pearl set on her breast, wholly 
recognises. He asks her whether she is really his Pearl, since the 
loss of whom 

I have been a joyless Jeweller. 

She says "Yes." But she is not lost, though he cannot now come 
to her. He must wait God's will awhile ; she is a queen in Heaven, 
which (he proving dull of understanding) she explains, adding the 
Parable of the Vineyard and an account of the Brides of the Lamb. 
He has a distant vision of the Heavenly City and the worship of the 
Lamb, and rashly endeavouring to cross the water, wakes. 

It is easy to see that this poem is not faultless. The fault does 
not lie, as some would vainly speak, in the allegory : for allegory is 
always a natural and frequently a powerful ally to poetry, while it is 
never dangerous if kept in its own place. The only faults of The 
Pearl in connection with allegory are that there is, as is the case 
with the vast majority of narrative poems of the kind in the fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries, far too much of a single common form — that 
of the Romance of the Rose, the following of which is actually con- 
ducted to the point of walking down the river before the adventure, 
such as it is, is met. But beyond this, beyond an occasional 
expression a little beyond reason in carrying out the minor points of 

1 Although Saint Helena and Saint Juliana have, by accident probably, the 
precedence of her in our earliest A.S. documents. Saint Margaret has probably 
a fuller series of extant Old English lives of nearly all periods than any other 
saint. No name was commoner, and of none do the abbreviations so often occur 
in familiar writing. 

Est mea mens mota pro te speciosa Magota! 
as the doggerel leonine has it. 



SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 



allegory (it is in this that Spenser and Bunyan so far excel their 
brother allegorists), and beyond an occasional succumbing to the 
temptations of alliteration, there are singularly few weak points in The 
Pearl. The exceeding beauty of its descriptive passages, especially 
that of the strange region where the poet awoke, its 

Crystal cliffs so clear of kind, 

and the mystic woods hanging down them, with their purple trunks 
and silver foliage ; the melancholy clangour of the verse, never de- 
scending to a mere whine, but always maintaining dignity and sanity 
in the midst of its sense of the pity and the loss of it, — these can 
escape no fit reader. The poet who could give such expression to 
pathos in The Pearl, to passion in Cleanness, and who had such a 
mastery of the descriptive faculty as appears in all three pieces, was 
no mean poet. 

G 



CHAPTER IV 

EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 

Sir Tristrem — • Havelok the Dane — King Horn — King AUsaiinder — Art/iour and 
Aferlin — h'ic/iard Caiir de Lion — The Seven Sages — Bevis of Hampton — 
Guy of Warwick — Ywain and Gawain — Lybeaiis Desconus — The King of 
Tars — Em are — Sir Orpheo — Florence of Rome — The Earl of Toulouse — 
The Squire of Ijjw Degree — Sir Clcges and Le Fraine — Ipomydon — Amis 
and Amiloun — Sir Amadas — Sir Triamour — King Atlielstone, etc. — The 
Thornton Romances — ■ Charlemagne Romances 

There has, perhaps, never been such a capital example of the danger 
of indulgence in literary satire by a man of the first literary genius 
as the comparative disrepute into which the ever (and most justly) 
increasing estimate of Chaucer has thrown the Early English metrical 
romances.^ That Chaucer himself, in the Rhytiie of Sir T/topas, 
intended to pour any real discredit on the class in general, I do not 

1 It may be convenient to give at once in a note the titles and contents of the 
chief collections of these romances — collections which in themselves fill one of the 
most satisfactory of book-shelves : — 

{a) Ritson (J.)- Ancient Engleish Metrical Romancccs (spelling was one of 
Ritson's numerous manias), 3 vols. London, 1802, containing a long and still, 
for all its errors and crazes, valuable dissertation, with Ywain and Gawain, 
Launfal, Lybeaiis Desconus, King Horn, The King of Tars, Emare, Sir Orpheo, 
A Chronicle of Englelond, Florence of Rome, The Earl of Toulouse, The Squire 
of Low Degree, The Knight of Courtesy and the Lady of Faguel, with, in the Ap- 
pendix, another form of Horn — Horn Child and Maiden Rimnild. 

{b') Weber (H.). Metrical Romances of the \%th, 14th, and i^th Centuries 
(3 vols. Edinburgh, 1810J, containing a less valuable introduction, with King 
Alisaunder, Sir Cleges, Le Frayne, Richard Carur de Lion, Ipomydon, Amis and 
Amiloun, the Seven Sages, Octavian, Sir Amadas, and the Hunting of the 
Hare. 

{c) Utterson (R.). Select Pieces of Popular Poctty (2 vols. London, 1817). 
The first contains Sirs Triamour, Isenbras, Degorc, and Gowghfer. 

(d) Hartshorne (C. H.). Ancient Metrical Tales, containing among other 
things King Atlielstone, King Edward and the Shepherd, Florice and Blanche- 
four, and part of the alliterative William of Palerne. 

{e) Halliwell (J. O.). The Thornton Romances — Sirs Perceval of Gales, 
Isumbras, Fglamour of Artvis, and Degravant (Camden Society, 1844). 

(/) Hazlitt (W. C). Early Popular Poetry of England (4 vols. London, 

82 



CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 83 

myself in the least believe. He probably had at most two or three 
"awful" examples (upon one at least of which it would not be 
difficult to put the finger even now) before him. And it is permis- 
sible to be equally sceptical in respect of his alleged contempt for 
the matter, especially the Arthurian matter, of these romances — the 
passages usually quoted will not bear the construction put on them. 
Chaucer's own adoption of different styles and treatments and sources 
of material is, at best, the most negative of arguments. It is as 
natural for some men of genius to prefer to take new ways, to strike 
into the path worn by the feet of none, as it is for others to produce 
masterpieces in kinds already tried by their contemporaries and 
predecessors. 

However, all that can be said positively is that if Chaucer did 
despise the romances, he merely exhibited that not infrequent in- 
firmity even of noble minds which makes men unjust to their imme- 
diate forerunners — which made Coleridge talk absolute foolishness 
about Gibbon's style, and which induced even Dryden, with his 
admirable critical catholicity, to imagine that Restoration verse was 
not merely a good thing in another way from that of the Elizabethans, 
but a positive improvement upon them. No such mistake can prej- 
udice our judgment. 

It is very difficult to place with any exactness the earlier, still 
more the earliest, examples of this fascinating form of composition 
in English. What is certain is that the Anglo-Saxon genius — for 
reasons too hastily pronounced upon by some, but for some reason 
or other — had very little inclination towards it. The admirable saga 
of Benvidf, though well enough known to have been modernised 
and copied long before the Conquest, seems to have found no 
imitators, or, at least, none that have survived — for the chance of 
an English original of Havelok is very strong. The enormous pre- 
ponderance of attention given to sacred subjects, both in Anglo-Saxon 
itself and in early Middle English, must have had something to do 
with this ; but the general decadence of Anglo-Saxon poetry after 
the eighth century must have had more. For in no country of 
Europe, except Iceland, was prose ready for the task until far later. 

It has therefore to be admitted fully that the known beginnings 
of romance in English all came from French in point of substance, 
while their forms could not be evolved till the '• shaking together " 

1864) contains, among a great many other things, Robert the Devil and Robert of 
Cisyllc \Sicily\. 

(g) Hales (J.W.) and Furnivall (F. J.). Bishop Percy's Folio MS. (3 vols. 
London, 1867) contains many variants of romances named, and some new ones, 
notably Egcr and Grime. 

Separate editions are noted infra; for collections of .Alliterative Romance see 
first note to next chapter. 



84 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

of English, Latin, and French itself had provided the new prosody. 
The earhest examples of the result now existing, and perhaps the 
only ones which can be reasonably attributed to a period before the 
year 1300,^ are the three romances of S/r Tristrein, of Havelok 
tlie Dane, and of King Horn ; and it is practically admitted that 
though the first . and second at least must almost certainly have 
sprung from British soil, they only appeared in the English language 
as translations or adaptations from the French. Each is of interest 
enough for separate consideration at such length as is here possible. 

In sheer intrinsic literary merit Sir Tristrein - is far from being the 
best of the three ; in fact it is certainly the worst. But its adventitious 
attractions are of the most unusual kind. It is, in all probabilit}', the 
first English romance in the great ''matter of Britain" — 
' the only rival, Arthour and Merlin, is, I think, later. 
It tells a story which, however it may seem to some to yield 
in poignancy, as in nobility of interest, to the companion loves of 
Lancelot and Guinevere, was even more popular in the joint days of 
the two, and which has maintained itself. It is identified — perhaps, 
indeed probably, by mistake, but still it is identified — with the 
interesting, if legendary, personality, and the certainly early vernac- 
ular productions of " Thomas the Rhymer." And last, but by no 
means least, in almost the earliest day of the revival of Romance, it 
had the honour to be ushered once more to public knowledge by Sir 
Walter Scott. 

With some of these attractions we must deal here in cruel 
brevity. The argument as to the question of authorship must be 
sought by those who are curious about it in the editions cited in the 
notes. It is enough to say that the "Thomas" cited by Gottfried 
of Strasburg, the chief continental handler of the story, can hardly 
have been Thomas of Erceldoune ; that the story of Sir Tristrem was 
certainly current in French long before the date either of the 
'• Rhymer " or of this rhyme ; and that it is, all things taken together, 
a little improbable, to say the least, that, considering the absence of 
any certain Scottish poetry till nearly the end of the fourteenth 
century, anything so elaborate as this should have been composed in 
such "Inglis" by a Scot before the end of the thirteenth — and 
according to the dates usually assigned to Thomas the Rhymer 

1 By fifty years after that date many, probably most, of our verse romances 
must have come into existence. The famous Auchinleck MS., whicli contains a 
good score, is of this time; and in the Cursor Mundi, which is perliaps as early 
as 1320, we find reference not only to these but to others, such as Sir Isumbras, 
of which our existing copies are later. 

- Scott's memorable edition of this can never, in a sense, be obsolete ; but more 
modern apparatus and knowledge are added in those of Kolbing (Heilbronn, 1882) 
and M'Neill (Scottish Text Society, 1886). 



CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 85 

(c. 1280) considerably before it. At any rate, the poem in its 
present form can hardly have come from any one who wrote north 
of the Tweed. That it is, as its latest Scottish editor holds, a 
southernised version of a work of Erceldoune does not seem to me 
entirely impossible. But it rests on no evidence. 

The form would lead us to believe it not much, if at all, anterior 
to the fourteenth century, the stanza used being one of those compli- 
cated and bizarre ones which, as has been explained in the last 
chapter, came from the attempt to adjust Provengal-French metres 
to English rhythm. It resembles one previously mentioned in the 
arrangement of the rhymes alternately in an eleven-lined stanza broken 
by a short fresh-rhymed bob at the ninth line. The best ar- 
gument for its being older than 1300 is that the staple line is of 
six not of eight syllables — for, as we have seen, the six-syllabled line 
or half-line somewhat anticipated its longer and more convenient 
amplification into eights. After the plump statement that the author 
was at Erceldoune and spake with Thomas, hearing a geste of 
Tristrem (which, by the way, is an odd fashion of signature, but very 
likely a shift to father work on a well-known name indirectly), it 
passes to a stanza of gnomic reflexion, very common, as we shall 
see, in the earliest days of English romance, and then plunges into 
its story, the Tristram-saga proper — the famous and fatal loves of 
Tristrem and Yseult being preceded in true saga fashion by a history 
of the unhappy contest of Rouland Rhys, Tristrem's father, with 
Douk Morgan. 

The rather unsuitable nature of the stanza for narrative is occa- 
sionally relieved by a middle rhyme — 

They ne raught [recked] how dear it bought, 

and on the whole does fairly well ; but the earliness of the piece 
finds a certain support in its crudity. The repulsive story of the 
fashion in which Yseult would have paid her maiden Brengwain's 
self-devotion is not in the least softened, and the poet does not show 
himself able, as his German predecessor had been able, to bring out 
the unmatched attractiveness of the sylvan life of Tristrem and the 
Irish princess. But there are good touches, at least not lost if not 
actually invented by the minstrel, such as that when the luckless, if 
unamiable, Mark discovers his queen and Tristrem with the sword 
between them — 

A sunbeam full bright 

Shone upon the queen, 
At a bore [hole] 

On her face so sheen — 

And Mark rewed therefore. 



86 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

It is not always that later poetry has succeeded in achieving or 
retaining a phrase so simple, sensuous, and passionate as that last 
line, which is almost the equal of Sappho''s 

eyo) 8k fxova KaT€v8u). 

Horn ^ and Havelok - are in less elaborate metrical form. The 
metre of both comes under the general designation of the octo- 
syllabic couplet — in Havelok lengthened and "swung" by the ad- 
mission of trisyllabic feet, in Hodi shortened so as to show that the 
poet was still hovering, as many did for a time, between sixes (or 
sevens) and eights. There is also some similarity between the 
general subject of both, which is that favourite romance domice of the 
heir kept out of his own. The palm, both for individuality of story 

and for spirit of narration, decidedly belongs to Havelok, 
the'Daiie. which has all the notes of a genuine local saga, and not 

merely of a literary composition on accepted romance lines. 
There is in it a double wrong done — the innocent Havelok, the heir of 
Denmark, being excluded by his guardian Godard, while Goldborough, 
heiress of England, is similarly treated by her tutor Godric. But 
Havelok, being as a male heir more dangerous, is exposed to greater 
personal danger than his destined l)ride, for Godard, determining to 
make away with him altogether, hands him over to the fisherman Grim 
to drown. Grim treats him roughly enough, but a night fortunately 
intervenes, and before the actual immersion the fisher's wife sees the 
sacred flame-aureole, sign of kinghood, on Havelok's brow, and her 
husband, having also prudently ascertained by a trick that he was like 
to have traitor's wages for his crime, gives it up and escapes oversea to 
England, where he lands at the future Grimsby. Havelok, brought up 
as a mere fisher boy, seeks service at Lincoln Castle, and distinguish- 
ing himself by strength and athletic proficiency as one of the "kitchen 
knaves" dear to romance, is chosen as Goklborough's husband by the 
usurper Godric, who, milder-minded or more economical in crime 
than his Danish counterpart, only plots to degrade not to slay his 
charge. Go]dl:)orough is naturally enough displeased at having to 
marry a scullion, but at niglit the mystic flame reconciles her to her 
lot. Right thus meets right, a party is formed for the young pair, 
and the two traitors receive their proper doom. In this, of course, 
there is a certain amount of romantic stock-matter, the humours 
and promotion of the scullion Havelok being a very favourite and 
early device found even in tlie ancient and brilliant French clianson 

1 Two versions, as noted above, in Rilson ; there are also three or four more 
modern editions, and the v^fhole is given in Morris and Skeat's Specimens, vol. i. 

2 Ed. Skeat, E.E.T.S. 



CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 87 

de geste of Aliscans. But the general tenor is, as has been said, 
unusually vigorous and fresh. The poet strides along like a man 
who has a real story of his own to tell, and is not merely compounding 
one out of dried or bottled materials. In fact, there is no doubt that 
the tradition as to the origin of Grimsby was an old one in Lincoln- 
shire ; and we find Robert Manning,^ a Lincolnshire man, in a 
rather quaint state of dubiety between his eai-ly familiarity with the 
story and the silence of his graver historical authorities on the 
matter. For, as has been, and will be again hinted more than once, 
the mediiEval mind — naturally enough, considering the vast surround- 
ing and invading seas of nescience which bounded its islands of 
knowledge — rarely seems to have had any distinctively critical power 
of distinguishing fact from fiction, and could at most attain to surprise 
at not finding the former in places where no trained historical critic 
would dream of looking for it. 

Horn, though a good poem, and preserved in various forms 
which have made it one of the best known of its kind, is less racy 
either of any particular soil, or of any special poetical faculty. A 
certain King Murray — the locality of whose kingdom is 

,.,,., „ . ,,, . ,, , king Horn. 

described with sufficient vagueness as '• buveste — and 

his wife Queen Godhild had a son Horn, who was a very beautiful child. 

Fairer was none than he was, 
He was bright as the glass, 
He was white as the flour, 
Rose-red was his colour — 

lines which, not unfairly, give the key-note of the real, but rather 
conventional, prettiness which marks the poem. As Murray was 
riding by the seashore he met with fifteen shiploads of Saracens 
keen, who frankly avowed their intention — 

The land-folk we shall slay, 

and began with the king. Horn's extreme beauty saves him from 
slaughter, but he is put in a boat, with his two companions Athulf 
and Fikenild, and set adrift. By luck and pluck they come safe to 
the coast of Westernesse, where the king gives him protection; the 
king's steward, Athelbrus, instructs him in knightly ways, and the 
king's daughter Rimenhild falls deeply in love with him. Indeed 
Horn Child and Maiden Rininild is the title of one of the actual 

1 In a long passage (ed. Hearne above cited, i. pp. 25, 26) ; given also in 
Prof. Skeat's Introduction, i.\., x. Manning, after duly translating Langtoft, 
who barely refers to Havelok, bitterly complains that neither Gildas, nor Bede, 
nor Henry of Huntingdon, nor William of Malmesbury, nor Pierce of Bridlington 
(i.e. Langtoft himself) says anything about the incidents of the romance. 



88 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

versions of the story. Athulf is a good friend, even witlistanding the 
awkward temptation of a moment when Rimenliild, mistaking him 
for Horn, makes the most undisguised advances ; Fikenild is a 
traitor, but his machinations, though nearly successful, are defeated, 
and Horn, of course, comes to his own in love and kingdom. 

The fifteen hundred short lines of the poem do not allow time for 
it to be tedious — the great danger of these somewhat identically con- 
structed stories — and there are passages of directness and vigour 
which deserve all the more recognition in that the piece, though 
probably translated from the French, is still very early, and can have 
had very few English originals to furnish the writer with stock 
phrases and passages. One of the straightest and best is when Horn, 
with his beloved's ring on his finger, meets the slayer of his father — 

Before him saw he stand 
That driven him had from land 
And that his father slew. 
To him his sword he drew, 
He looked upon his ring, 
And thought on Rimenhild, 
He smote him through the heart 
That sore him gan to smart, 

which, though the last line is a little superfluous, cannot be called 
contemptible in so early an attempt. It is worth while to notice the 
assonance in 7-ing and hild. Assonance does not suit the English 
ear, and is rarely attempted in English ; but it was so prevalent 
in the French models of the writers of the thirteenth century, and 
it is such a help to a novice in rhyming, that it would be strange 
if it did not sometimes occur. 

We may conveniently take next a group of romances, in all 
probability not much junior to these, that is to say, dating at latest 
but a little within the beginning of the fourteenth century, and 
attributed by a German scholar, who is honourably distinguished for 
the union of pliilological and literary competence. Dr. Eugen 
Kolbing, to the same hand. I cannot say that I myself see any strong 
probability of this, but at the same time I cannot see any very 
serious argument against it ; and its admission would add to the list 
of English poets a figure anonymous indeed, but more considerable 
in quantity of work than any other before Chaucer, and certainly not 
inferior to any except the equally shadowy personage, to whom, as has 
been said in the last chapter, the other quartette of The Greene Knight, 
The Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience has been similarly gifted. At 
any rate the four romances themselves, King Alisannder^ Arthour and 
1 Ed. Weber, as above. 



EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 



Merlin^ Richard Cceur de Lion^^ and the Seven Sages,^ are each 
and all among the most interesting of their kind, among the oldest, 
among the most considerable in scale and subject ; and whether they 
had a common author or not, they are equally worthy of con- 
sideration. 

The history of the formation and transformation of the 
mediaeval legend-history of Alexander belongs to another story than 
that of English literature. It is sulificient to say here that the 
English romance in question follows generally the lines 
of the great French Roman d'' Alixandre, but assigns Aiisaufider 
greater proportionate space and credence to the initial 
fables about Nectanebus (Neptanabus in the English), the Egyptian 
enchanter-king who revenged himself upon Philip by seducing 
Olympias in the guise of the god Amnion. The wonders and episodes 
of the later part, the Fountain of Youth, and the rest are, on the 
other hand, curtailed, but as it is the poem extends to more than 
8000 lines in octosyllabic couplets of a good stamp. These coup- 
lets, which form the measure of all the romances now in question, and 
supply one of the arguments for their common authorship, show a 
considerable advance in ease and grip over the respective kinds of 
Horn and Havelok. The writer in all rejects, or, if the phrase be 
thought more appropriate, has not arrived at, the hard and fast 
French octosyllable, and allows himself Christabel equivalence in a 
very satisfactory manner. Another very noticeable peculiarity shared 
by some, though not all, of the group is the interposition — in such a 
manner as justified Weber, the poem's editor, in taking the 
phenomenon as implying chapter or " fytte '' division — of short gnomic 
or descriptive prefatory remarks, which have nothing whatever to do 
with the narrative, as thus — 

Merry time is the wood to sere, 
The corn ripeth in the ear, 
The lady is ruddy in the cheer, 
And maid bright in the lere, 
The knights hunteth after deer, 
On foot and on destrere, 

1 Ed. Kolbing, Leipzig, 1890. It had already been printed for the Abbots- 
ford Club (1838) by Turnbuli, and like many of the romances in this chapter, 
abstracted still earlier by Ellis in his famous Specimens of Early English Metrical 
Romances, which (despite a tone of persiflage sometimes though seldom inappropri- 
ate) is still the best introduction to the subject, and easily procurable in Bohn's 
Library. 

2 Ed. Weber. 

3 In two forms, one given by Weber, and the other by Wright for the Percy 
Society (1845) with a valuable introduction. 



go THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



which comes, apropos of nothing whatever, between the story of 
Alexander's coronation, as Prince Expectant and King-coadjutor, and 
his knighting. The whole poem is one of the most spirited of the 
romances, and Weber's claim for it, that it is less burdened with 
expletives than others, is just, and even within the mark. These 
nuisances, which appear with the very rise of the style, which are not 
absent even in Chaucer, and which in fifteenth-century work like that 
of Lonelich become a mere abomination, are quite rare in it, and the 
author's faculty of description is extremely vivid and good. Where 
he fails, as all English and most mediaeval poets before Chaucer do 
fail, is in character. 

ArtJwur and Merlin is still longer than Alisaunder, extending to 
not much fewer than 10,000 lines, not dissimilar in character 
from those just noticed, but less regularly and abundantly provided 
with gnomic introductions or '' fytte " headings. It is 
^'■^j^^^;;.,^/"^ averse rendering of what is called the "Vulgate" 
Merlin^ an early history of the court of Arthur, pre- 
ceded by an account of Merlin's own birth, and of the adventure of 
Uther with Igraine, which seems to have been thrown into French 
prose before the end of the twelfth century, or not much later, and of 
which, besides other verse renderings, including one by the above 
Lonelich, only published in part (see Book iv.), there is a good prose 
English version published by the Early English Text Society. The 
most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are not here, and, as in 
all the Merlins, a vast amount of space is taken up by battles with 
the Saxons and with Arthur's rival kings, which Malory's extraordinary 
literary instinct led him to omit or cut short. But, on the other hand, 
there are things in these Merlins which we miss in Malory, especially 
the earlier and comelier version of the enchanter's enchantment by 
his lady-love. Apart from the subject matter, the piece deserves 
commendation, inferior indeed to that allotted to the Alisanndcr, but 
not small. Still, if they had the same author, he had either not yet 
learnt in the Artlwiir to do without expletives, or had in it succumbed 
to a bad habit which he had earlier resisted ; and the catalogues of 
names are rather tedious. The great interest of the piece is that it 
is the first setting of the romance of Arthur (for Layamon supposed 
himself to be telling history), that we possess in English — the king 
of all stories of the land having at last come to his own after 
linguistic exile for a century and a half in French. Indeed there are 
touches about the piece which might justify a conclusion that it is 
decidedly older than the Alisaunder, and may even belong to the 
thirteenth, not to the fourteenth century. 

Richard Cceur de Lion, the third of the group, is pretty certainly 
the best. It has not merely the general interest of being " matter of 



CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 91 

Britain/' but the more direct appeal of being the geste of a great 
English prince, told at a time near enough to his own to have 
tlie relish and savour of popular fancy and fondness. 
It is rather more than 7000 lines long ; and the metre ^^'^'dTum^"^ 
is managed with a spirit of which we find few exam- 
ples in Arthonr and Merlin, and though more, yet fewer than here 
in Alisaunder itself. Even the finale, '• common form " as it is, will 
show this — 

Thus ended Rychard our King, 

God give us all good ending, 

And his soul rest and roo, 

And our souls when we come thereto ! 

Here is the real diable an corps of the ballad-romance style — the 
combined faculty of speaking simply and straight, and vietring with 
vigour and variety. Nor is the matter of the poem inferior to the 
manner. Sir Walter Scott has made it better known than most of 
our romances through his quotations in the Talisman notes, referring 
to the grimly humorous episodes of the cooking of the Saracen's 
head instead of a pig's jowl, and of the king's ferocious banquet, on 
the same material, to the Paynim ambassadors. A recent French 
historian who cried aflfrightedly over a certain letter of Troubridge to 
Nelson, "This is the laughter of cannibals," might be better justified 
here ; yet the humour of the thing and the spirit of it quite carry oiT 
the savagery. 

Here too, almost for the first time (save in that very likely con- 
temporary proem of Robert of Gloucester which has been quoted), 
appears really English patriotism, the triumph in the Lion-heart's 
exploit as a king of England, which (call him Angevin or anything 
else) he was. The refrain " Richard our King" obviously comes from 
the heart; the malison on his traitor brother — 

his brother John 
That was accursed, flesh and bone — 

is equally hearty. Never before in English do we find the real dare- 
devil tone, rightly associated with Romance, as here — 

He [Richard] gan cry, As artns ! Gare ! 

Cceur de Lyon — how they fare ! 

Anon lept King Richard 

Upon his good steed Lyard, 

And his English and his Templeres 

Lightly lept on their destreres, 

And flings into the heathen host 

In the name of the Holy Ghost. 



92 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



On few things would it be pleasanter to dwell than on this poem of 
real fiesh and blood, which is good in its overture as to the fair fiend 
" Cassodorien " (who takes the place of Eleanor as Henry's wife and 
Richard's mother, with, no doubt, a remembrance of the Angevin 
house-fairy iMelusine), better in the '"lion's heart" episode, but best in 
its fighting scenes. Indeed it is the first and best fighting poem in 
Middle English. But we must j^ass on, only observing that here also 
the heroic couplet, and that curious English fancy for winding up with 
it at a marking or turning point which is so noticeable in Shakespeare, 
make their appearance — 

And swore | by Je | su that | made moon | and star ) 
Ayenst | the Sa | racens he | should learn | to war | 

(unless indeed this is an embellishment of the editor's). The gnomic 
insertion occurs now and then in this poem. 

The Seveti Sages is the shortest of the four, not much exceeding 
4,000 lines, and like all the versions, prose and verse, of the famous 
Eastern collection or collections from which it is derived, it is in 

fact a mere series of short tales bound together by one 
^^Sa%s!" o^ t'''^ usual straps — in this case the stories are told by 

a wicked queen to support her false accusation of her 
stepson, and by his Seven Wise Masters on his behalf. The general 
literary interest of these things, and their far travel from the East, is 
great ; but though in the piece, and still more in the later Gesta 
Roinanoriiiii, they produced noteworthy books in English,^ their 
special attraction for us is less, inasmuch as they were but transla- 
tions of translations of translations, having • been beyond all doubt 
decanted tlirough Latin and French, and perhaps Greek before either, 
on their way from tlieir Eastern homes to their English receptacles. 
They are, however, interesting as tlie earliest, or among the earliest, 
instances in our language of the short verse-story itself — the fabliau 
which, in a couple of generations or so, Chaucer was in the Canterbury 
Tales to make the vehicle of one of the capital efforts of European 
poetry. Although there is no doubt some general resemblance, of 
the kind almost unavoidable, to the other three, the Seven Sages 
seems to me even less likely than Arthour and Merlin to be the work 
of the same author as Alisaunder or as Cceur de Lion, for there is 
much less spirit in the verse, and there is present that indefinite, but 
to careful observers very noticeable, inability to distinguish between 
prosaic and poetical incidents which marks off the born prose-writer 

1 The actual English Ges/a may not be very early, but authority seems to favour 
the English origin of the Latin original. 



CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 93 

(in the bad sense) from the born poet. That some of the stories in 
the Seven Sages are disgusting does not so much matter ; the 
Saracen's head episodes of Richard are not precisely delicious. But 
the poet of Richard knew how to carry these off, the poet of the 
Seven Sages did not know how to carry off the others ; and the differ- 
ence, though not very easy to prove by example, is at once felt in 
the reading. 

All the metrical romances hitherto noticed are beyond doubt 
either actually of the thirteenth century, or only a very little younger. 
But it is a matter of difficulty and guesswork to decide which of the 
much larger number that remain should accompany them, and which 
should be postponed till we come to the fifteenth or the late fourteenth 
century, from which probably the larger number of th/^ actual manu- 
scripts date. Thus, as noted above, we have a notice of Sir IsiDnbras 
in the Cursor Mundi, or about 1340 at latest; but our text of it — 
tliat in the Thornton MS. — is a full century later. On the whole, 
the best plan will probably be to notice here all the metrical romances, 
which may possibly be older in their original forms, if not in their 
present texts, than the death of Chaucer, and to keep for the com- 
pany of Malory those which, like Sir Launfal in Chester's version, 
and the work of Henry Lonelich, distinctly belong to the later time 
by authorship if not in substance. 

It is probable, but not certain, that all the English romances — 
even those which, like Havelok and Horn among those already men- 
tioned, like Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick among those to 
come, rest upon English traditions and deal with English scenes — 
were directly translated from French originals. Sometimes, as in the 
just mentioned case of Sir Isuinbras, we have no knowledge of such 
originals, and sometimes, as in the case of Sir Amadas, there is oppor- 
tunity for confusion. 1 There may have been exceptions to the general 
rule of translation from French ; but there is no reason to think that the 
rule was not general. And it was probably the exigencies of the transla- 
tion — the termination of the original sense, leaving part of a line still 
to be filled up, and the like — which encouraged, and to some faint 
degree excused, that practice of stuffing and padding with expletives 
and stock phrases that brought the whole class into really undeserved 
disrepute. 

Only brief observations can be made on each of these romances, 
but except by oversight none shall be passed over ; and in face of 
the difficulty, not to say impossibilit}', of dating them with any 
certainty, they shall be mentioned for the most part in the company 

1 The Cursor Miuidi mentions this too, but with the addition of the heroine's 
name, Idoine. This identifies it for us with an existing French romance of the 
double title, quite different from our English Sir Amadas. 



94 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book 

and order in which they appeared in the printed collections of Ritson, 
Weber, and others. 

Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton^ which were the first 
except Sir Tristrein to enjoy the honours of separate publication, 
owed those honours in all probability rather to their traditional fame, 
to their great size, and to the fact that both are found in the precious 
Auchinleck MS. — which Boswell's father gave to the Faculty of 
Advocates, and which is not merely the largest but one of the oldest 
of existing Romance MSS. — than to their intrinsic merit either as 
poetry or, except for the mere adventures, as story. In these last 
respects — to speak with all the tenderness due to such famous names 
— they are rather poor things, inferior to the majority of their com- 
panions, and owing almost all their charm to the mere common form, 
the ready-bottled herbs and essences, of the average romance of 
chivalry. Neither has anything specially English about it except the 

names, and the adventures of both are carried on mostly 
HamltoH ^^ countries other than England. Bevis of Hampton, 

the better of the two, owing to the lively characters of 
Josiane the heroine and Ascapart the giant,'^ rests upon the well-worn 
theme of a faithless wife, a murdered husband and father, a disin- 
herited son, and an intruding tyrant. There is some interest in 
Bevis's vengeance on his father's murderer and his own wrongdoer, 
appropriately named Sir Murdour ; and his horse Arundel and sword 
Morglay rank well among those favourite properties of Romance. 
But the kindness (somewhat "coming" and forward, but legitimately 
imitated from the conduct of all Paynim princesses in the chatisotis de 
geste) of Josiane, her courage, her fidelity, are really the salvation 
of the piece. Giiy of IVarxvick (another and still longer tale of 
adventures all over the Romance world, with a huge coda telling 
those of Rembrun or Raynburn, the hero's son) lacks this attraction. 

Felice, the heroine here, is a cold and capricious mistress 
Warifkk. (^^''^ pattern doubtless of the Polisardas and Miraguardas 

of Spanish fiction), who is indeed useful to the story by 
constantly requiring new exploits from her suitor. It is true that he for- 
gets all about her by the way once, and only the sight of the wedding- 
ring that he is about to put on another's finger reminds him at the 

1 They were both edited for the Abbotsford Club by Turnbull, Bevis in 1838 
and Guy (a mighty quarto of black letter) in 1840. The eccentric C. K. Sharpe 
furnished both with frontispieces in the Retzsch style, one of which, that to Bevis, 
is very comic. Guy has been re-edited, in both fourteenth and fifteenth century 
forms, with immense care by Dr. Zupitza for the E.E.T.S., and Bevis by Dr. K61- 
bing for the same society. 

- Ascapart now quietly guards the gates of Southampton with his victor and 
benefactor ; but he was not a good giant to the end, and was killed after turning 
traitor. 



CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 95 

fifty-ninth minute and second of the eleventh hour. And she is 
justly, though by no means interestingly, punished when Guy after 
marriage is seized by a craze of chastity, and determines to desert 
his wife and unborn child, spending the rest of his days as a palmer 
and hermit. There is plenty of fighting (for he has not abjured that 
pleasure) in the sequel, including the famous combat with Colbrand ; 
and Guy, at last coming home, is not recognised by Felice till at the 
point of death he sends her ring to her, ^nd she receives his last 
breath and dies after him. The story appears to have been almost 
without exception the most popular of all the romances in England 
from a very early time, and its immense length and varied incidents 
give, of course, abundant scope for successful treatment. But in 
none of the versions which have come down to us (Ellis would make 
an exception for the Colbrand part) does it seem to have fallen into 
the hands of a poet of any power. The crowning moment of the 
meeting of Guy and Felice, the latter unknowing, the former con- 
scious, is blundered with a completeness which makes us think 
vividly of the admirable success of the Scottish poet Henryson at the 
somewhat similar meeting of Troilus and the lazar Cressid. The 
sheer silliness which dogs the footsteps of Romance shows itself in 
Guy's forgetful ness, which is as absurd as his conscious succumb- 
ing to new charms could have been mads natural. Almost every 
chance throughout the long record is consistently missed, and the 
undoubted popularity of the thing in verse and prose, in MS. and 
print, in recitation and reading, can have been due to the adventures 
alone. ^ 

Of Ritson's collection,^ the Chronicle does not here concern 
us. Sir Lannfal we postpone, and the interesting Lady of Fagicel 
(Fayel) is rather a ballad than a romance. Yivain and Gawain 
is a free adaptation of Chrestien de Troyes's Chenalier 
an Lyon, one of the earliest poems of the Arthurian cycle, ■* cawa%"^ 
which, having been also paraphrased by Hartmann von 
Aue, has the advantage of appearing in English, French, and 
German. The English poet, though unknown (that prolific eidolon, 

1 The point where the poet fails least is perhaps the short passage describing 
the revulsion of feeling which causes Guy to quit his wife, and which comes from 
the sudden thought, as he gazes on his fair heritage from the towers of Warwick, 
of the carnage and devastation he has wrought — 

All for the sake of woman's love. 
And not for the sake of God above. 

But even this is not very well done. Guy, it should be said, is partly in couplet, 
partly in twelve-line romance stanza. Bevis has the same partition, but the 
stanzas take the shorter six-line form. 

2 See note, p. 82. 



96 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

the supposed author of Arthoiir and Merlin^ has been credited with 
this also), does not compare ill with his famous fellows. The poem, 
which is about 4000 lines long, in couplets, has spirit 
■^ ^conus. '^ ^"^ merit throughout. Lybeaus Desconus (which strange 
appellation is only Le Beau Decotinu with its Old French 
form misspelt) is also a Gawain poem, dealing with a son of that 
courteous knight. It is about half the length of the last, in 
stanzas of twelve six-syllabled lines. This is not a very good romance 
medium, but the poem is above the average. Its story is a variant of 
the " Daughter of Hippocrates " ; but Sir Lybeaus is not exposed to 
the danger of refusing to kiss the worm's mouth, for she takes the 
initiative, and the transformation scene is very gracious. The King 
of Tars (same stanza, but in fairly regular eights for 
'^^^Tarf'^ I 2 4 5 7 8 10 II, and sixes for lines 3 69 12) gives a 
Christian and Paynini fighting story of average interest 
in not quite 1200 lines. But Emare (trisyllabic, Eniari), in the 
same stanza, but 200 lines shorter, is one of the best. The verse 
is good ; the description of the cloth embroidered in 
the four corners with the stories of Aviadas and 
Idoyne, Tj-tstrem and Iseult, Florice and Blanchefloiir, and the 
Sowdone of Babylone is one of the best stock-passages of 
mediaeval upholstery, and the character of Emarfe is touched 
with a distinctness and a tenderness which are none too common in 
these poems. It is one of the class of stories in which fathers fall in 
love with their daughters and are resisted. That Emare should be 
set afloat in a boat by her father, blown to a friendly shore, married 
to the king, plotted against by her mother-in-law, again floated forth 
with her little child, once more succoured by good Samaritans, and 
finally restored to her proper place and to the chastened affection of 
her repentant father, is all common form, if not commonplace. What 
is not commonplace is the graceful fashion in which the tale is told, 
and the writer's abstinence from the long-vvindedness which is so 
frequent a fault. Sir OrpJieo is Orpheus and Eurydice 
with a happy ending, for which the Middle Ages had a 
possibly childish, but certainly healthy liking. It has some 500 
lines in couplets. 1 Florence of Ro)ne (over 2000 lines in the twelve- 
lined stanza) is the daughter of the Emperor. She is 
^^"lioine. most unseasonably courted by Sir Garc}', Emperor of Con- 
stantinople, who was a hundred years old, and whose 
disqualifications are spiritedly told in this stanza — 

1 The Auchinleck version of this, whicli Laing printed (see first note of next 
chapter), is called Orfco and Heurodis. Both contain charming descriptions of 
Fairyland, which, with the parting of husband and wife and other passages, make 
the piece one of the most delightful of the whole class. 



CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 97 

His flesh trembled with great eld, 
His blood cold, his body unweld, 

His lippes blue forthy; 
He had more mister of a good fire, 
Of right brands burning shire. 

To beik his bones by, 
A soft bath, a warm bed, 
Than any maiden for to wed, 

And good encheason why — 
For he was bruised and all to-broken, 
Far travelled in harness and of war wroken, 

He told them readily. 

Florence and her father naturally object. Sir Garcy, who is not too 
old to fight, attacks Rome and brings it to great straits. Florence, 
to spare bloodshed and misery, offers to sacrifice herself, but her 
father will not hear of it, and dies in a sally. Two brothers, Sir 
Miles and Sir Emere, get the better of Garcy, and Florence marries 
Emere ; but his brother plays the traitor during Emere's absence, 
carries off the faithful Florence after a false report of Emere's death 
has proved useless, hangs her to a tree and beats her, like the Counts 
of Carrion in the Cid story. Nor is this the last of her trials, though, 
of course, all comes right. This piece is rather unequal, and the 
Earl of Toulouse (1200 lines in the same stanza) is 
rather slight. But the Squire of Low Degree (a happy Toulouse 
title, and one which made its fortune) comes, in about 
the same length of couplets, up to its promise. The famous distich 
with which it opens — 

It was a squire of low degree 

That loved the king's daughter of Hungary — 

obeys, unconsciously no doubt, the maxims of authority as to the ad- 
vantage of plunging the reader straight into the subject, 
and he is never let go. The introduction of the valiant ^^^^ ^'^^^^^_ 
squire (who, for all his '• low degree," was marshal of 
the king's hall) is cunningly managed, not too soon after the opening 
nor too late for the refrain to ring in the ear — 

And all was for that ladye — 
The king's daughter of Hungary ! 

The garden, with the favourite mediaeval catalogues of trees and 
flowers, and the references to other romances, follows, and still 

The king's daughter of Hungary ! 

rings agreeably now and then. The squire tells his love, and the 



THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



lady accepts it in all honour, with stated conditions, and a warning 
against the steward — stewards are generally wicked. But cautious 
as she is, she ends with " kisses three " — one less than the pale 
knight gave La Belle Dame Sans Merci, but not made more lucky by 
their sacred number. The steward sees them, and vows mischief. 
The king will not believe his calumny, but the steward undertakes to 
show the lovers together, and unluckily the squire, after taking leave 
of the king to seek adventures, returns under cover of night — 

To take leave of that lady free, 
The king's daughter of Hungary! 

The interview takes place, but the enemy is upon them. The squire 
cuts the steward's throat, but is overcome by numbers and im- 
prisoned, his lady thinking him dead, because her father's men have 
cunningly changed his clothes with the dead steward's at her door. 
Her father offers her a curious catalogue of delights^ if she will leave 
oiT mourning ; but she will not, and after seven years the relenting 
king sends the squire to make him a name in Lombardy and gives 
him his daughter at his return. A fairy tale without fairies, but a 
pleasant one and well told. 

The chief constituents of the next collection (Weber's, in 1810), 
Alisaunder, Cceur dc Lion, and the Seven Sages, have been already 
noticed ; but it contains others which must not be passed over, and 
one at least which is of great merit. The makeweights of the great 
Alexander poem in the first volume are Sir Cleges, a short piece in 
not quite fifty twelve-lined stanzas — respectable, but of no 
Sir Cleges ^nA „,.gj^^ j^^^g — ^^ ^j^g favourite medisival motive of the knieht 

L,e rraine, o .^ 

who spends his all, not in riotous living, but in generous 
housekeeping, and recovers it. This in the present case is partly by 
divine mercy (which gives him cherries at Christmas), and partly by 
his own shrewd wit and stout heart, avenging him on the court 
officials, who strive to hinder or blackmail his present of these 
cherries to the king. The other is a translation of the Lai le F7'aine 
of Marie de France, rather a fabliaie than a romance. The second 
volume, which contains Richard Ca^ur de Lion, contains also two 
romances of great excellence, Iponiydon and Amis and Aniilonn. 

The former is one of the best stories, and not the worst 

pomyion. ^^j^^ ^^ ^^^ wholc class. It is in some 2400 lines of 

couplets, and bears a remarkable analogy to the at present untraced 

"Sir Beaumain's " episode of Malory. The hero is the heir of Apulia 

iThis list of all the things the Middle Ages loved best — finery and music, 
wines and foods, sports and pastimes, casdes and yachts, with crews singing 
lieyho and rumbelow, "geiUyle pottes with ginger gieen," and "blankets of 
fustyane " — fills over 100 lines. 



CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES— METRICAL 99 

(" Pouille " or " Poile," as it meets us in French and English 
romance), the pupil of Sir Tholomew, one of the good old knights so 
common, and the suitor of the heiress of Calabria. He deter- 
mines to rest only on his own merits, visits her court incognito, 
makes himself conspicuous and attractive by the usual mediaeval 
virtue of lavish giving and skill in the hunting art, and then retires to 
let his charms work. After a time he goes to the (then) adjacent 
court of Saxony, obtains the post of honorary and honourable lover 
to the queen, and from this point of vantage enters for the tourna- 
ment which is to decide the spousals of the Calabrian Princess. 
He puts on daily fresh disguises of white, red, and black armour, with 
all tilings to suit ; overcomes, of course, but, in true romance fashion, 
is not satisfied with so easy a victory. Difficulties with foes or un- 
known friends, Sir Camys and Sir Campanys, have to follow before 
all is as it should be. 

As for Amis and Afiiiloun, no Middle Age story is the superior 
of this for pathos and beauty ; but it is only an adaptation of a much 
older French chanson de geste, and so interests us less here than 
those romances which are either English by origin, or 
have no known French original, or are adapted with ^Amiiiolt. 
some special difference. The third volume, which con- 
tains the Seven Sages, contains also Octovian Iniperator (a story of 
some liveliness, but a very bad poem, in 317 six-lined stanzas, syllabled 
888484 and rhymed aaabab), Sir Atnadas, and The Hunting of 
the Hare. This last, like the Tournament of Tottenham and some 
others, is a burlesque of some, but no extraordinary, merit. Sir 
Amadas, which has nothing to do with Amadas and Idoyne, but is 
found, as we shall see, in another version, has rather less than Soo 
lines in the twelve-lined stanza. It is a sort of variant of Sir Cleges, 
but the knight recovers his fortunes not by shrewdness ^. 

, , , . ^ , . , , 1 • , 1 /- 1 • -J"" Amadas. 

but by his charity to a dead corpse which he rinds in 
ghastly conditions, it having been kept from burial by a brutal 
creditor. The general poetical merit of Sir Amadas is not great, 
but the situation is good, and there is one couplet which only wanted 
a little trimming to make it a sublime one. The knight, having seen 
the festering debtor, is at a feast of much splendour — 

[But] 
Sir Amadas made little cheer, 
For the dead corse that lay on bier 
Full mickle his thought was than [then]. 

The first three of the Utterson Romances — Sir Triamour, Sir 
Isenbras, Sir Degore — are taken from early printed copies and are 
in very lamentable state — the twelve-lined stanzas of Sir Triamour, 



loo THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

for instance, appearing by tlie grace of tlie copyist or the printer in 
irregular batches of threes, varying from six lines to eighteen. And 
the curse of prose, which, with such rare exceptions, 
weighed in the fifteenth century, is heavy on it. But 
the story, which is one of the class of queens wronged by stewards, 
is touching.^ Still better in this respect, though even worse off in 
others, is the beautiful legend of Sir Isenbras or /siimbras, who in 
his domestic happiness and worldly pride forgot God, and was 
punished by the successive loss of possessions, children, and wife, 
to have them restored after he was purified by much suffering and 
gallant daring in deed. Sir Degore (supposed to be = L'egare, but 
unfortunately responsible for " Diggory ") is a short romance in 
about looo lines of couplets celebrating the prowess of a '"love- 
child." Sir Gowg/iter, which Utterson was the first to print, is a very 
interesting and spirited variant of the story of "Robert the Devil," 
in between fifty and sixty twelve-lined stanzas. 

Hartshorne's book, containing much interesting matter, and 
possessed of all the attractions of the Pickering Press, has always 
been a trial to students from its confused arrangement, its present- 
ment of shreds and patches, and its careless editing. But it gave 
from different Cambridge 1\ISS. King At heist one, a spirited story of 
the ordeal by fire, dating from the fourteenth century, 
King Athel- jj^ j-j^g twelve-lincd stanza; Kins; Edward and the 

stone, etc. ^ , . , , 

Shepherd, one of the mnumerable variants oi the 
favourite donnte of a king guesting incognito with his subjects ; an 
extract from Florice and Blanclieflour, nearly the most popular of all 
mediaeval stories ; one from William and the Werewolf, which being 
alliterative is reserved for the next chapter; and a great number of 
small burlesques or fabliaux, the Tournament of Tottenham, the Boy 
and the Basin, the Cohwolds' Dance, etc. 

The Thornton Romances ^ give the English version, not a very 
valuable or extensive one, of the great story of Sir Percevale (143 
twelve-lined stanzas) ; another version in better condition of Sirlsnm- 
bras ; Sir Eglaniour (also twelves), the nearest to Sir Thopas of all 
the romances in faults, and chiefly salvandnni because it contains the 
name " Christabel " ; and Sir Degravant, in the same stanza, but 

1 Mr. Halliwell printed a MS. version for the Percy Society, and there is another 
in the Percy Folio. The editors of this last seem to think better than I do of the 
execution of this tale of King Aradas and Queen Margaret and the wicked steward 
Manock ; but I quite agree with their praise of its spirit and substance. 

- So called from their transcriber, a Yorkshireman, who a little before the 
middle of the fifteenth century included them (with much of the most noteworthy 
work of or attributed to Hampole, and other things) in one ot the Ofunium 
gatherum MS. books so fortunately fashionable in the Middle Ages. It belongs 
to Lincoln Cathedral. 



CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 



an altogether rougher, older, and less mawkish composition. The 

companion Camden Society volume by Mr. Robson, which is chiefly 

noteworthy for the alliterative Auntyrs of Arthttr (see 

next chap.), also contains a different version of Sir ^RomanTes"" 

A/ziadas, and a non-alliterated Arthurian romance in 

sixty stanzas of a rather peculiar metre, sixteen-lined, each quatrain 

consisting of a monorhymed octosyllabic triplet and a six. 

Lastly, we may mention a group of Romance which in subject has 
least interest of all, while of its most attractive members the alliter- 
ative story of Ranf Coilyear belongs to the next chapter, and Lord 
Berners's Hhoh of Bordeaux (prose) to the next Book but one. These 
are the English Charlemagne Romances, of which some at least, if 
not most, in their earlier form must date from our present 
period. These are Sir Ferufnbras, a long version of the RomanceT^ 
French Fierabras in some 9000 lines of the six-lined 
stanza ; the Soivdone of Babylonc, another version of the same in an 
early kind of the ballad quatrain of eights and sixes — early and long 
(3000 and odd verses) for this form ; the Siege of Milan and Roland 
and Otuel, each in the twelve-lined stanza and each about 1600 lines 
long ; a fragment of an English Song of Roland. All these, with 
Caxton's prose Charles the Great and Four Sons of Aymon, which 
will fall like Huon to be noticed hereafter, have been printed for the 
Early English Text Society. None of the romances just named is 
of the first merit or interest. Indeed, the Carlovingian epic, when 
stripped of the intense idiosyncrasy of the chanson form, hardly 
tolerates any other save prose. 



CHAPTER V 

EARLY ROMANCES — ALLITERATIVE 

Gawaift and the Green Knight —The Arvntyrs of Arthur — Williatn of Palerne 
— Joseph of Arimathea — The Thornton Morte d' Arthur e — The Destruction 
of Troy — The Pistyl of Susan 

The interesting phenomenon of the revival of alUteration, the facts 
and causes of which in the early fourteenth century have been more 
than once referred to, naturally had its chief exercising ground in the 
field of Romance. The most remarkable of all English alliterative 
poems later than Anglo-Saxon times, the Vision concerning Piers 
tJie Plow/nan, falls for treatment in the next Book, and a good many 
others date only from the fifteenth century. But not a little interest- 
ing work belongs to the time of this cliapter. 

The most intrinsically interesting examples of Alliterative Romance ^ 

1 The greater part of the work mentioned in this chapter will be found in the 
following collections, some of which include much else. One or two pieces which 
occur by themselves will, as before, be noted later: — 

(a) Pinkerton (J.). Scottish Poems, Edinburgh, 1792, which gives a version, 
with altered title, of the Awnt}'rs of Arthur. 

(b) Laing (D.). Ancient and Popular Poetry of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1822, 
and thrice reprinted since, including the Pi sty II of Susan and the Awntyrs. 

(c) Madden (Sir Frederick). Sir Gaioayne (Bannatyne Club, 1839), giving 
Gawayne ari the Green Knight, the A^vnfyrs, etc. 

(rfV'^pbson (J.). Three Metrical Romances (Camden Society, 1842), con- 
taining a third te.\t of the A'contyrs. 

(e) Amours (F. J.). Scottish Alliterative Poems (Scottish Text Society, 1897), 
containing the Pistyl of Susan and the Awntyrs. 

Much of the introductory matter of these books is occupied with a discussion 
of the authorship of these poems, into which it is impossible here to enter fully, 
but of which so much has been made that a slight notice of it, with the present 
writer's own conclusions, m;iy justly be expected. Wyntoun, the verse chronicler 
{%'ide Book iv.), dealing with a disputed point in Arthurian matters, cites a certain 
" Huchowne," describing him as " of the Awlc Ryale," and saying that 

He made the great geste of Arthure, 
And the Awntyrs of Gawane, 
The Pistyl also of sweet Susane. 

This has set the speculative commentators off at almost interminable score. 
Huchowne (Hutcheon, Huchon, the usual French accusative-diminutive of Hugh 

102 



CHAP. V EARLY ROMANCES — ALLITERATIVE 103 

are beyond doubt Gawain and the Green Knight^ and William of 
Palenie or William ami the Werejvolf. The former may, like 
the latter, have had a French oria;inal, but none such is ^ 

, ' . , 1 1 , r • . • Gtnvatu ana 

known, and it stands at the head of an interesting group t/is Creen 
of Gawain Romances, which it is not fantastic to asso- l^^-'sht. 
ciate with Cumbrian rather than Welsh or Armorican traditions, but 
which are certainly Celtic in character.- Of Gaivain I have already 
observed that the identity of its author with him of the interesting 
Pearl group is not, according to my notions of literary evidence, 
proven; but it is not impossible. The poem consists of rather more 
than 2500 lines, in a curious irregular sort of stanza, consisting of 
an uncertain number (from sixteen to twenty), mostly unrhymed, 
unmetred, but somewhat dactylically rhythmed " four-accent " lines 
regularly alliterated, terminating with what Guest has made it usual 
to term a " bob and wheel,'' that is to say, a single foot iambic and 
an eight- or six-syllabled quatrain — the five rhymed ababa. This 
scheme, which, with variations, is not uncommon, seems to show 
that some revivers of alliteration themselves felt that it could not be 
depended upon entirely alone — that it must be backed by the charms 
of metre and rhyme. 

Even in this poem, the best of its kind, the fatal danger of allitera- 
tion — that the selection, or at worst invention, of the "•rhyme-words" 
is too often solely determined by their sound, not their sense — makes 
itself painfully felt.' But the author's power is very much greater 
than that of most of his competitors in metre or in alliteration, and 
the story is one of singular interest and force. It opens jvith a 
touches suggesting the very old and popular piece (also a Gawain 

or Hugues) has been erected into a great poet of the tliirteenth century, the earliest 
(or the earhest next to Thomas the Rhymer) of known Scottish poets, and has 
been endowed with all, or more, or fewer of such early alliterative poems as are 
known to be or may possibly be of his time, the amplest appanage including 
Gawaync and the Green Knight, the three alliterative religious pieces r ed at 
the end of chap, iii., the Pistyl, the Atoatyrs, an alliterative Morte i' /rthure, 
also contained in the Thornton MS., and what not. In argument for I'against 
this the stores of dialect, allusion, diction, and the like have been litera ransacked, 
with the most contradictory results. Those interested in the matter may be 
referred to the introductions in question. We may here safely say three things — 
(i) Nothing is known of " Iluchowne " save from Wyntoun, and Wyntoun does 
not say whether he was Frenchman, Englishman, or Scot, nor in what language 
he wrote ; (2) It is not impossible that he may have written some of the poems 
in question, especially the extant P/jY)'/ ()/6'/^j-(?/7, which {vide infra) is at least as 
old as 1380 ; (3) There is no evidence that he wrote this or any other. 

1 Re-edited after Madden by Professor Skeat for the E.E.T.S. 

2 Gawain, unlike Lancelot, appears in the earliest handling of the story; and 
Welsh authorities always strive to put him above his rival. This is most 
curiously illustrated in the late Welsh version of the Graal story, Y Stint Great 
(London, 1876). 



I04 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book n 

one) of the Chevalier an Lyon or Vwahi, but soon all resemblance 

ceases. Gawain (who in all this group, as in the earlier romances 

generally, is not represented as the light o' love which the French 

and Germans made him) undertakes, when others quail, the adventure 

of a perilous '* Green Knight " who enters Arthur's hall unbidden 

and challenges any one to give him a buffet and bide one in turn. 

The king's nephew fetches a swashing blow with his battle-axe and 

beheads the knight clean, but the trunk picks the head up, mounts 

the green steed with it in hand, and departs, after the lips of the 

severed head have given Gawain his venue at the Green Chapel on 

New Year's Day twelvemonth. When the appointment draws near 

Gawain arms himself splendidly and rides alone through England to 

North Wales in quest of his doom. He is royally guested at a castle 

where the knight welcomes him warmly, and the lady even more so, 

and where he is told that the Green Chapel is close at hand. His 

host proposes a bargain — that they shall exchange whatever they 

gain in hunting or otherwise — and Gawain grants it. The host hunts 

with great success, but Gawain stays at home, He is tempted by 

the chatelaine, but resists so far as only to take a kiss. He keeps his 

word on receiving the host's game by giving him a kiss, though he 

will not (as indeed he need not) tell him where he got it. A second 

day witnesses the same events ; but on the third the lady, who now 

very nearly overcomes the knight's steadfastness, forces on him her 

girdle, which has the virtue of making the wearer invulnerable. This 

temptation is too much for him when he thinks of his perilous 

adventur-e,^and he takes it (with "kisses three") under promise of 

secrecy. Accordingly when swapping-time ^ comes he gives his host 

the kisses, but says nothing about the girdle. The reader anticipates 

the result. The host is the Green Knight, though not even at the 

last, when in his fantastic garb he meets Gawain and deals the 

deadly blow, does he reveal this. Gawain Hinches ("shunts") at the 

first stroke, but manfully bides another, which only gives him a flesh 

wound. He draws his sword, prepared to fight it out as the wager 

is accomplished, but the knight leans calmly on his axe and reveals 

the truth. He and his wife agreed to tempt Gawain, who came out 

scatheless except in his acceptance, through caution, if not exactly 

cowardice, of the girdle-lace, and his failure to give it up according to 

compact. Therefore he saved his life, but lost his blood. The 

knight, Bernlac de Hautdesert (who is one of Morgane la Faye's), 

forgives him, gives him the lace, and all ends happily. The high 

and yet not mawkish morality of the piece is well matched by the 

telling, and the romance is certainly one of our very best. 

1 This is no slang — the word " swap " is in the text. 



CHAP. V EARLY ROMANCES — ALLITERATIVE 105 

The still more curious, though as literature inferior, Antnrs or 
Awntyrs (adventures) of Arthur at the Tame IVathcling (Tarn 
Wadling in Cumberland), but for its strong and regular 
alliteration, might have been put in the last chapter. o/^Arthnr^. 
For here the unrhymed tirades of the Green Knight 
become regular nine-lined stanzas, rhymed (rather imperfectly, it 
is true) abbababc. There is no " bob," but the " wheel " consists 
of a triplet and singleton rhymed dddc. The story opens in a strange 
and promising manner with the apparition to Gawain and the 
Queen of a specially loathly spirit, the ghost of Guinevere's mother, 
to give her good advice, and this is told with some power ; but the 
romance then declines into an ordinary fight between Gawain and 
Sir Galleron of Galway. We have three texts of it in the Douce, 
Thornton, and Ireland-Blackburne MSS. respectively ; and all three 
have been printed in the collections referred to in the note at the 
beginning of this chapter. The language is in no case " Scots " — 
indeed, as we shall see later, it could not be ; but it is in all Northern, 
like that of almost the whole of the poems of this group, and in at 
least one form, that of the Ireland-Blackburne version, it is distinctly 
uncomely, not to say barbarous, though this rather suits the grisliness 
of the ghost. 

William and the Werewolf, or William of Palerne,^ less 
original, so far as we know, than the Green Knight, but pretty freely 
adapted from its extant French model, is in plain and unadulterated 
" four-accent " verses, directly comparable with Piers 
Plowman, of the oldest version of which it may be ten pau"ne{ 
or fifteen years the elder. The story of a missing heir 
fostered by a werewolf, who is himself the victim of machinations, 
is interesting, and the execution sometimes capital. Indeed, it is 
superior to the Green Knight itself in one point, the rejection of 
uncouth or manufactured words for the mere sake of alliteration. 

Two important Arthurian poems, one certainly and the other 
very probably dating from this period, belong to the plain unrhymed 
and unstamped variety of alliterative verse. One of these is on 
foseph of Arimathea^ and the other is the long 
alliterative Morte d'Arthure of the Thornton MS., which A^-'iZi^hfa. 
has had its claims put in as the " great geste " of 
Huchowne. The date of this manuscript is, as has been said, much 
later than our present period ; but in view of its other contents this is 
no argument. The fosep^i is contained in the Vernon MS., and there- 
fore certainly ours here. 

It is of no great length — about 700 lines — and does not seem, 

1 Ed. Skeat, E.E.T.S. 



io6 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

though it is incomplete, to have been ever much longer ; it is only a 
paraphrase of the constantly reworked legend of its subject, and it 
has no special literary characteristics. Yet it has interest for us, like 
so much else, because it shows the set of the tide — not in this case 
the main set but an important "overfall " — in the alliterative direction, 
and the way in which the great '' matters " of mediaeval interest were 
being at the moment handled in England. 

The alliterative Morte d^ Arthur e'^ is a much bigger thing, ex- 
tending to over 4000 lines, and possessed of distincter literary char- 
acter. It belongs in point of matter to what may be generally called 
The Thornton ^^^^ " ^''"•''- " rather than the romance type of the Arthurian 

Morte story, and busies itself, like the older versions of that story 
generally, with the king's wars against the Romans chiefly, 
ignoring the more romantic, and even the more mystical, parts of the 
legend almost or altogether. But it is a vigorous piece, employing 
its somewhat rugged and clumsy implement of verse with a sort of 
sword- or rather axe-play which is refreshing and effective, and calling 
to its aid a vocabulary well suited to the subject and style, and suffi- 
ciently individual. Few will wish for a complete literature of such 
poems ; but we could endure several more as good as this Morte 
d ^ Art /litre. 

Among its actual companions it seems to have had pieces dealing 
with both the great classical subjects of mediitval romance, Alexander 
and Troy ; but the aUiterative poems on the first subject which can 
rpjjg be probably referred to this period are but fragmentary. 
Destruction It is otherwise with the great Destruction of Troy^- which 
'""•''' we possess in plainly alliterated verse, and which is not 
impossibly older than 1400. This is a huge poem of over 14,000 
lines, translated with a certain amount of freedom from the popular 
compilation on the subject by Guido Colonna, written in a Northern 
or North Midland dialect, and containing no sort of identification of 
author or time of composition, though attempts have been made to 
father it on the usual Huchowne. It is less rugged than the Morte 
d'' Arthur e, and a good deal less picturesque, though appearances are 
unfairly against the poet when he says in his penultimate line "Now 
the proses is put plainly to end," for he only means " process." On 
the whole, it is by no means unreadable, long as it is, and every now 
and then, in some of the interminable fighting, in some storm passages, 
in the account of the death of Ulysses at the hands of Telegonus, 
and in the Troilus and Briseida ^ episodes, the writer contrives to 

1 Ed. Perry, E.E.T.S. 

2 E.E.T.S., ed. Panton and Donaldson. 

3 The retention of this form ot the name is perhaps an argument for an 
early date. For by 1400 the authority of Chaucer would most probably have 



CHAP. V EARLY ROMANCES — ALLITERATIVE 107 

acquit himself very fairly. But it does not compare well with 
its chief rival in tlie same " matter " on the metrical side, King 
Alisaunder. 

And so we come to the Pistyl of Susan, one of the smallest in 
bulk, but, for reasons already given and others, one of the most remark- 
able. It is a versification of the pleasant piece of poetical justice 
which, as " not found in the Hebrew " of the Book of 
Daniel, was turned out from the Canon into the Apoc- '^^^^"an 
rypha of the English Bible, but is still to be found 
there, and was, until recent tamperings with the Lectionary, regularly 
read as First Lesson at Even-song in the Church of England on 
22nd November. The earliest version (there are four others dating 
from the fifteenth century) is found in the great Vernon MS. of 
the Bodleian Library, one of the hugest of its kind, containing some 
800 very large pages filled with religious compositions, and put by 
experts at not later than 1380. 

Susan contains exactly 366 verses (a number perhaps not fortui- 
tous) arranged in one of the varieties (the eight-line with bob and 
wheel) of the peculiar alliterated and rhymed stanzas already described. 
The alliteration is heavy — four alliterated words being often, and I 
think five sometimes, crowded into a not very long line. But it is 
very well managed, and the poem is distinctly above the average not 
merely of its class, but of mediaeval verse generally. The author 
follows the Vulgate narrative closely as a framework, but amplifies 
and embroiders in the usual fashion, and occasionally breaks in with 
a completely original addition. The two chief of these (of unequal 
value) are one of the stock mediaeval gardens, with apples and 
pomegranates, parrots and goldfinches as serenely mingled as in 
the Swiss Family Robinson, and a most beautiful stanza describing 
the parting of Susanna and her husband Joachim : — 

She fell down flat on the floor, her fere when she found, 
Carped [spoke] to him kindly, -as she full well couthe (could) : 
" Iwis I thee wrathed never at my witand (witting), 
Neither in word nor in work, in eld nor in youth." 
She cowered up on her knees and kissed his hand — 
" For I am damned, I not dare disparage thy mouth." 
Was never more sorrowful segge (man) by sea nor by sand, 
Ne never a sorrier sight by north ne by south. 

Then there 
They took the fetters off her feet, 
And ever he kissed that sweet. 
" In other worlds shall we meet," 
Said he no mair. 

whelmed " Briseis " and " Briseida " once for all in " Cressid." Yet some think 
that Chaucer's Troiltis is referred to. 



io8 



THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Huchowne or no Huchowne, the man who wrote that was a poet 
in form and in fact. Nor does his dealing "disparage" the mouth of 
Daniel when that youthful prophet comes to judgment and ad- 
dresses the elders (indeed they richly deserved it) in language of 
extreme directness. 



INTERCHAPTER II 

The incorrectness, or at least the insufficiency, of that view of literature 
and literary criticism which despises the historic estimate, and bids 
us look only to " the best and principal things," is perhaps nowhere 
illustrated in a more complete and damaging fashion than by the 
period of which I have endeavoured to give some account in the 
foregoing Book. With exceptions, rare in number and almost 
infinitesimal in proportional bulk, it contains nothing that can, by the 
widest inclusion and the kindliest judgment that retains critical 
competence, be described as " best " or •' principal " in relation to 
literature at large. Whether even these exceptions — a lyric or two of 
the calibre of Alison, a passage here and there in Layamon and the 
Romances, the flashes of intensity in the author of Cleanness, the 
melancholy music of The Pem-l and some of the Hampolian poems, 
the simple and pathetic parting of Susanna and Joachim quoted just now 
— whether even they reach the fringe of the best things may be questioned 
without excessive severity. Under a still lower and more accommo- 
dating standard this Early Middle English literature demands, in 
order to enjoy much of it as literature, a kind of pre-established 
harmony of taste in the reader, not a little acquaintance with other 
letters, and a certain though not a very great amount of patience 
and preparation in the mere rudiments. Every now and then, 
especially in the alliterative poems, the strange combination of 
elaborate pains and insufficient accomplishment or taste will posi- 
tively disgust ; in almost every case an impatient temper must know 
how to avoid, or a patient one how to endure, vast overdoses of ill- 
baked bread to a modicum of sack, vast stretches of literary desert 
to a few not always quite paradisaical oases. 

And yet there is no portion of English literature the study of 
which can be wholly pretermitted with greater danger, none the study 
of which is repaid by greater increase of understanding, and even of 
enjoyment, in regard to the rest. It is desirable, no doubt, that the 
student — even that the reader, who, though he may not call 
himself a student, wishes to read intelligently — should read Anglo- 

109 



THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Saxon literature ; but it cau hardly be said to be necessary. In 
certain points, and tliose of the most imj^ortance, some acquaintance 
with Middle Englisli literature before Chaucer may be said, to be an 
absolute necessity. Fortunately we now only preach to the converted 
when we insist on the necessity of understanding Chaucer in order 
to understand what follows him ; before long, let us hope, it will be 
equally unnecessary to dwell much on the hopelessness of understand- 
ing Chaucer unless we have some understanding of what he followed. 

Let us see, then, what the three hundred years which passed since 
the date of our last summary, in the first of these interchapters, had done 
for English literature, what they had put ready as accomplished facts 
for acceptance or rejection in the way of materials and in the way of 
tools for any one who felt the vocation of writing about, or a little after, 
the middle of the fourteenth century. 

In the first place, though this concerns us least, and is moreover 
a now generally accepted fact, they had provided a language which, 
disguised a little by the occasional retention of obsolete forms of 
letters, by unsettled and capricious spelling, and by dialectic 
variations, possessing still a considerable number t)f obsolete words, 
and lacking as yet some of the terms of art and thought which the 
translators, and especially tlie prose-writers, of the fifteenth century 
were to add, was to all intents and purposes English — not Old 
English, not Middle English, but English, with still a chip or fleck 
of shell in the shape of an inflection only half discarded upon it, but 
about to cast even these off". The notion of Chaucer as having 
flooded the language with French words in contradistinction to the 
sound Saxon vocabulary of his contemporary Langland died hard, 
and perhaps simulates life even yet ; but its obstinacy in surviving is 
merely Partridgean. 

If less general adhesion be given to the proposition that English 
metre was also, in the rough at least, fully created, that, I believe, is 
chiefly due to the much inferior attention which has been given to 
the subject. It is true that the formative period of prosody had not 
yet ceased, and that the genius of the four masters, Chaucer himself, 
Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (to whom it is perhaps but just to 
add Surrey and Marlowe), had to be applied before all the resources 
of English in this respect were at the command of whosoever chose — 
and chooses — to use them. It is true that at the actual time a revolt, 
and a rather formidable one, was being made by alliterative rhythm 
against metre. This went some way, and if Langland had had 
variety, flexibility, range, equal to his intensity — especially if he had 
had anything like Chaucer's command of phrase — it might have gone 
farther. But the truth is that alliteration, witli its tyrannous restriction 
to the word which must be, not the word which ought to be, chosen, 



INTERCHAPTER II 



is the deadly foe of phrase itself, and consequently of style, and could 
not have triumphed. On the other hand, English metrical writers 
themselves had to unlearn something and to learn much. They had 
to get rid of the final e, a live thing once, but now somewhat like a half- 
dead but not severed branch on a tree. They had to get rid of the 
superstition of the central pause, and of strict syllabic number, 
which they derived, though they fought against both, from their 
French models, and in the first case from the grasp of the "dead 
hand" of Anglo-Saxon itself. But 150 years at least of steady 
practice, of constant pressure of metrical form, on the yielding but 
by no means merely passive body of older rhythm, had got the 
poetical capacities of the language into real shape, had made not a 
merely mechanical junction, but a true graft. The octosyllable and 
decasyllable, with the trisyllabic variance in each, were already 
established, a crowd of ballad and romance combinations of eights 
and sixes was in existence, the rhymed, loose-pivoted line of the Moral 
Ode and Robert of Gloucester, with the unrhymed double stave 
of the alliterators, were ready between them to produce a family of 
metres of greater compass than the decasyllable — the Alexandrine, 
the iambic or trochaic fourteener, the tetrameter anapaestic. It is true 
that the actual production of these in any satisfactory form was 
postponed for a century and more ; but that is merely one of the 
constant accidents of literary history, and we shall perhaps be able to 
give some explanation of it when we come to sum up the fifteenth 
century itself. 

Of advance in the direction of kinds and subjects we have to 
speak with more reserves and allowances. In some cases there is 
even a falling back ; tlius Early Middle English is entirely destitute 
■of the sound and valuable, if not extremely accomplished, original 
historic prose that we find in Anglo-Saxon. Indeed, in the whole 
domain of prose there is at best a stationary state, at most and more 
commonly a distinct decline. Nor is this in the least surprising. 
Prose is, far more than verse, a matter of practice and copying ; and 
by the tenth century — the best age of Anglo-Saxon prose — that 
language had had experience plentiful in bulk and extensive in time, 
if a little restricted in kind. The disorganisation which necessarily 
attended the remaking of the language made this practice to at 
least some extent useless and obsolete, while there were no models 
for the new tongue except Latin, inasmuch as none of the modern 
vernaculars (except Icelandic) had any prose worth speaking of to 
give it. We shall indeed see thai no really good English prose 
appeared till a long apprenticeship in translating Latin and French 
had supplied this want. Meanwhile, such prose as there was, was 
more than ever exclusively religious. 



112 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book 

This meant in its turn that all new kinds and subjects, whether 
suitable or not, had to be treated in verse, and they were so treated. 
It has been often enough pointed out that, to compensate for its 
drawbacks, verse had at least one merit, that in a non-reading age it 
was better suited for reading or reciting aloud to others. At any 
rate, its predominance is an undisputed fact, and one on which it is 
not necessary to dwell. Homilies and paraphrases of the Bible, 
narrative historical and narrative fictitious, rudimentary science, 
political satire, anything and everything found a vehicle in verse of 
kinds nearly as various as the subjects, but with the skipping 
octosyllable or the swinging, if not yet very smoothly swinging, 
fourteener for preference. Much of this verse (and that not merely 
in the Romance section) is pleasant and profitable to read even now. 
But comparatively little of it can be said to be fully accomplished as 
literature, and almost the whole of it is pervaded by a characteristic 
not new (for it confronts us almost equally in Anglo-Saxon) ; not in 
the least surprising, for it was practically inevitable ; but necessarily 
affecting the interest and merit of the whole in an unfavourable 
way. 

This characteristic comes from the fact that the great majority of 
the literature of the period is certainly, and that all but an infinitesimal 
part of it is probably, not original literature at all but translation. It 
is true that translation was not then so entirely unoriginal a thing as 
it is — as it prides and boasts itself upon being — now. Unkind 
critics have suggested that at least one reason why the mediaeval 
translator allowed himself such liberties was that he had not the 
scholarship to be faithful ; kind ones may prefer to see in it at least some- 
thing of native literary aspiration, and the desire not merely to tread 
in the e.xact footsteps of another. But what is certain is that in 
English and at this time really original writing — writing "out of a 
man's own head" — is so rare as to be, in important instances, almost 
unknown. When a man did not, as the enormous majority of the 
romance-writers and not a few others certainly did, merely translate more 
or less loosely a single precedent work, he either compiled from several 
or (as must have been the case with even the more original religious 
writers from him of the Ancren Riwle downwards) wrote on subjects 
which had been so frequently handled, and which had such a large 
stock of prescribed and expected commonplaces and common forms 
appertaining to them, that his work has almost the character of a 
translation, or at least compilation. Nothing is more singular, more 
characteristic, or more puzzling in mediitval literature than 
the immense mass of its additions to the literary stock of the 
world, not merely in mere bulk of writing, but in new themes, new 
touches, new handling of all sorts — contrasted with the almost impos- 



INTERCH AFTER II 113 



sibility of attributing any large original increments of the kind to 
single persons. It is not made, it grows. The great Arthurian 
legend itself is only the crowning example of the kind. In a few 
years this passes from the barest and most unpromising scantlings 
first, and then from an ingenious but not specially poetical sham 
history like a hundred others, to the stateliest and most elaborate 
structure of romance that exists. And how, from whom, exactly 
when, exactly where all this comes nobody knows, though in the 
desperation of craving for knowledge men have constantly thought 
and asserted that they knew. Nor is this the only point of the kind 
in which the Middle Ages resemble the enchanted forests of which 
they were so fond. Nothing happens as it might be expected to 
happen : the land which pretty certainly furnished the materials of 
the legend does not furnish the language in which it is first told ; 
the language decoys the investigator away from the real fatherland of 
the story. '' Everything is somebody else's," as the pathetic-humorous 
complaint of later fiction has it. 

Yet to those who can be content to acquiesce in ignorance of an 
authorship which is, after all, a matter of very little consequence, and 
in whom the artificial thirst for Qiiellen, for origins, does not master 
the natural one for the water or wine of literature, whether fresh- 
drawn from spring, fresh-pressed from grape, or transfused through a 
dozen vessels, provided only it be clear and well-tasted — there is 
little disappointment and much satisfaction in the literature, even the 
English literature, of this jDcriod. If the writers seldom absolutely 
created for themselves, they are as a rule careful never to leave any 
capital that may come into their hands entirely unimproved, if it be 
only by fresh borrowings and combinations. And it is perhaps. not 
less reasonable and more fair to suspect that their additions were, in 
many cases at any rate, not borrowings at all but original gifts — 
that the creative fancy, too shy and distrustful of itself to go alto- 
gether alone, took its opportunity of exercise under cover and with 
the assistance of what existed already. At any rate, till we know to 
the contrary, there is no harm, for instance, in giving Layamon the 
credit of Argante and the elves ; and if it should unluckily turn out 
after all that he does not deserve it, why, we can at worst transfer that 
credit to somebody else. The thing is important in literature, not the 
man. 

Moreover, for those at least who are fortunate enough to take 
interest not merely in the thing, but in the way in which it 
is treated, the manner in which it is done, this Middle English 
period has plenty of attraction besides that chief one of prosody, 
which has been sufficiently brought out. Not only is the mere word- 
hoard regularly, if at first slowly, increasing, but the uses of it are 
I 



114 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii 

varying, multiplying, acquiring deftness and artistic value with every 
author and in every book. Here we have the rough draft of a word- 
play or a conceit familiar in Elizabethan writers. There we see (in a 
pamphlet published by Wynkyn de Worde, and translated from the 
French, it is true, but no doubt much older in both languages) an early 
form of the trap by which Goldsmith for once avenged himself on 
Johnson, and actually obtained an acknowledgment of his victory. 
Here again a familiar cadence in verse, there (it is true very rarely 
as yet) a memorable rhythm in prose, connects itself, for those who 
have the fortune to recognise the connection, with better things, or at 
least other things, to come. We are still in the workshop, and hardly 
any master workman has yet appeared, but opus fervet and the 
master .himself is at hand. 



BOOK III 

CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 
CHAPTER I 

CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 

Life — Probably spurious Tales — Other questioned work — The arguments for and 
against it — Admittedly genuine work — The three periods — The Romaunt of 
the Rose — The Minor Poems — Troilus and Crcssid — The House of Fame — 
The Legend of Good I \ 'omen — The Canterbury Tales 

It was somewhat past the middle of the fouiteenth century when the 
long process of incubation and experiment which we have followed 
from the cessation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to Hampole, Rlinot, 
and the revival of alliterative verse, culminated in a generation of 
positively accomplished, and in some cases positively known, 
poets and prose- writers. Chaucer is not the earliest of these; 
he is not, as is sometimes still openly said, and perhaps mucli 
more frequently thought, the only one worthy of attention. But 
he is by so much the greatest figure, that he deserves to give, as 
he has always given, name to the period, and to have precedence of 
those who, like Gower possibly, Langland, if Langland it was, and 
Wyclif pretty certainly, had the start of him in literary performance. 
The life of Chaucer has fo>" the greater part of a century had its 
full share of that touching, if not always intelligent, devotion which 
justifies the theory that the human race is not after all indifferent to 
its heroes. We know indeed very little about him that 
has even the slightest connection witli literature ; and 
we are bidden to give up the idea that he once beat a Franciscan 
friar in Fleet Street — wliich is picturesque and not impossible. 
We know that Cecilia de Chaumpaigne pardoned him or released 
him de raptii meo ; but we have no portrait of Cecilia, we know 

"5 



ii6 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book in 

nothing about her, and there is no more interesting probability about 
the matter itself than that raptiis mens was one of those abductions 
of heiresses for purely mercenary reasons which were extremely 
common in mediaeval times and later, perhaps as late as the days and 
experiences of Henry Fielding. We know the pots of wine assigned 
as Chaucer's allowances, the details of his court suits as a page, and 
a great many other even less interesting details ; but for the real 
Chaucer, the man, the poet, we are left to the poems and our own 
imagination, being perhaps not the more unhappy therefor. 

There is no positive evidence of the date of Chaucer's birth ; i for 
that of his death, 1400, we have not only tradition but the strong 
circumstantial proof that his pensions ceased to be paid at that time. 
The birth date used to be fixed at 1328, and is now shifted to 1340, 
for reasons which must be sought in the biographies. The older 
date suits better with the acknowledged fact that Chaucer was an old 
man wlien he died ; the new with most known circumstances of his 
life. He was pretty certainly the son of John and Agnes Chaucer, 
the former a citizen and vintner of London, who had a house in 
Thames Street. The separation between Court and City was not in 
mediaeval days by any means sharp or total, and John Chaucer was 
not only a citizen and vintner, but held a post in the Royal House- 
hold which necessitated his accompanying King Edward and Queen 
Philijjpa to the Continent in 1338. Nor is there any doubt that 
Geoffrey Chaucer himself was in close and constant connection with 
the Royal Family. 

The first link of this connection has been presumably found in 
some accounts for the household of Lionel, Edward's son, which record 
the provision of cloth, etc., and money allowances to a Geoffrey 
Cliaucer in 1357. Two years later he served in the army which 
invaded France, was taken prisoner, and ransomed in March 1360. 
In 1367 he had a pension of 20 marks as valet of the King's 
chamber. In 1370, 1372, 1377, and 1378 he was employed on 
diplomatic mi.ssions abroad, the second and fourth extending as far 
as Italy, with practically certain results on his literary work. We 
cannot find space here for the successive grants, from pitchers of 
wine to pensions, which he received for those and other services, with 
their cessations, restorations, diminutions, and augmentations, all 
which the biographers record to the uttermost farthing. The most 
important and interesting of these details are that in 1374 he received 
from the Corporation of London a lease for life of the gate-house at 
Aldgate, which he actually held for many years ; and that a little 

1 Editions are extrf^mely niimoious; tlie standard library form is that of Pro- 
fessor Skoat's work (Clarendon I'ress), in six volunu^s, with a seventh containing 
what modern philological scholarship regards as the Chaucerian Apocrypha. 



CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 117 

later he was appointed Comptroller of Customs in the port of London. 
His prosperity ebbed and flowed with that of the sections of the royal 
house to which he was more particularly attached, and was at its 
worst during the predominance of the Duke of Gloucester under 
Richard IL But though Chaucer was faithful to the latter, the 
accession of Henry of Bolingbroke did him no harm, as he had been 
attached of old to John of Gaunt. It seems that he probably died at 
Westminster, where he had taken a house not long before. He was 
certainly married ; his wife pretty certainly died in 1387; and he had 
a son named Lewis, to whom in 1391 he very agreeably dedicated his 
Treatise on the Astrolabe. But his wife, whose name was apparently 
Philippa, is rather a shadowy personage, her identification as sister 
to Katherine Roet or Swinford, last wife of John of Gaunt, being 
rather probable than proved. Nor is there much positive evidence 
of Chaucer's formerly alleged connection with Woodstock or of his 
fatherhood of the Thomas Chaucer who became a person of wealth 
and importance later. ^ Nor is it superfluous to add a word of 
caution on the attempts made to take the personal descriptions in 
the Prologue to Sir Tliopas as authentic. Nothing apparently will 
cure commentators of this rashness, not even the diminutive figure 
which Thackeray has subjoined to his own pretty faithful delinea- 
tion of the face of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. What manner of 
man Chaucer was mentally we can see with infellible certainty 
from his work ; what he was physically is quite unimportant and 
utterly uncertain, though there is a fair chance that the so-called 
Occleve portrait, occurring in a MS. of that writer's work, may be 
genuine. 

On the work itself (and in this case much more reasonably) 
infinite pains have also been spent ; but here also we meet with 
difficulties. There was, of course, in Chaucer's time no regular 
" publication " of literature ; and not only in that time, but for long 
afterwards, precise dating of work was an exception and an accident, 
while precise attribution of it was rarer still. In the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries, both in MSS. and early printed copies, a very 
heterogeneous mass of material came to pass under Chaucer's name 
which it has been the business of the last century to sift. This mass 
may be conveniently found in Chalmers's Poets, and it may, stopping 
short for the moment of all controversial matter whatever, be divided 
into four classes : — 

1 At the same time, it is not to be too lightly rejected, for the authority is 
Thomas Gascoigne (the author of the Liber I'eritatiim, partly edited by the late 
Mr. Thorold Rogers), who was born but a year or two at most after Chaucer's 
death, was later Chancellor of Oxford, in which University he resided almost all 
his life, and was a man interested in letters, inquisitive, and usually well-informed. 



ii8 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES hook iii 

I. What is certainly, or so probably as to amount to certainty, 
Chaucer's. 

n. What is certainly not Chaucer's. 

ni. What, on grounds which can be admitted by strictly 
literary and comparative criticism, is probaljly not Chaucer's. 

IV. What, on grounds doubtful to such criticism, has been 
rejected by some. 

With the matter contained in the second class, such as Lydgate's 
Tale of Thebes and Henryson's Testament of Cressid, we need not 
trouble ourselves. It never had any business where it was, and such 
of it as deserves notice will have that notice elsewhere. The third 
Probably division, though containing some interesting work also, 
.spurious may be brietiy dismissed. The Tale of Ga/nelyn, a 
capital ballad-romance in rough but spirited eights and 
sixes, containing a version of the story on which Shakespeare founded 
As Vote Like It, is the best of the division and an excellent thing. 
But neither metre, language, dialect, style, nor anything else about it 
is in the very slightest degree Chaucerian. It belongs distinctly to 
the class of poetry which, whether he contemned it or not, he 
certainly eschewed ; and it could only be his as a literary ton?- de force 
entirely out of character with the age. So too the less excellent 
PhnvmatCs Tale, in eight-lined stanzas of eights rhymed ababbcbc, 
though less good than the Gamelyn, is equally or even more 
un-Chaucerian. It is a half-mystical .satire, evidently written by some 
one who had both Chaucer and Langland before him, and who chose 
to throw the matter (as far as he could catch it) of the one into the 
form (as far as he could conceive it) of the other. Here again 
Chaucer could only have written the thing as a tour de force, 
as a kind of parody, in the spirit of the nineteenth, or at farthest 
back of the eighteenth, century, not of his own time. There is no 
such strong and absolute improbability about tlie Pardoner and the 
Tapster or the Tale of Beryji, but their external attribution to Cliaucer 
is late, and the internal evidence is far from strong. 

The case is very different with another class of work, which, 
unlike this last, passed the vigilant and eminently literary scrutiny of 
Tyrwhitt, but has during the past thirty years been black-marked 
owing to the operation of a class of argument which 
questioned was, I believe, started by the late Mr. Henry Brad- 
work, shaw, and whicli has been perfected by Dr. Skeat. The 
power of literary, or at least bibliographical, divination which Mr. 
Bradshavv possessed does not seem to have been exaggerated, any 
more than the " magnetic " force of his personal character. And 
it is impossible for any one who has the slightest knowledge of 
the immense erudition and the unwearied kindness of the present 



CHAP. 1 CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 119 

Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge to speak of him witli dis- 
respect. Furtlier, there is the difficulty that the class of argument in 
question, itself resting on extremely minute points of linguistics, pho- 
netics, and other "sciences of the border," as we may perhaps call 
them, seems to demand an equal specialism from those who would 
attempt to meet it. Yet the criticism which would exclude from the 
Chaucerian canon such things not merely as the Court of Love and 
The Flower ami the Leaf, but in whole or in part the existing English 
version of the Romance of the Rose, which we know that Chaucer did 
translate, cannot be allowed to pass quite unchallenged by those 
whom it does not satisfy.^ 

This criticism rests, as I understand it, upon two points — alleged 
differences of language, which, in the Court of Love especially, is said 
to be much later than Chaucer's time ; and still more, alleged diflfer- 
ences of rhyme. Few can lay much real stress on such arguments 
as that TJie Flower and the Leaf must have been written by a 
woman because the supposed narrator is addressed as "daughter" 
— an argument which would prove, among ten thousand other 
agreeable absurdities, that Fatitna was not written by the author 
of Locksley Hall, and that Sir David Lyndsay was a four-legged 
creature. 

It is said more seriously that Chaucer in his certain works never 
rhymes such a word as grene, in which the final e still existed, to such 
a word as been, where it was not ; that he never rhymes y and ye, and 
so forth. And upon pleas of the kind an injunction against ticket- 
ing the incriminated poems as even possibly Chaucer's has been 
sought, and commonly taken as granted. 

This question, of course, cannot here be argued at length, but it 
is far too important to be passed over altogether. And as similar 
arguments, //n/fatis mntandis, are applied to much in- 
teresting work of others before the Restoration, I may arguments 
be allowed briefly to state three demurrers, in ascending for and 

r 1 1 • 1 • T against It. 

order of what seems to me cogency, which justify, 

again as it seems to me, suspension of judgment in all the cases 

where these arguments are brought. 

A. The first and weakest (being merely ad homines, but still stronger 
than others) is that the black-markers should agree a little better 
among themselves. The English Rose, for instance, has been split 
up, and the very parts which are granted to Chaucer by one critic 

1 It does not seem necessary to dwell on all the Apocrypha, many of the 
pieces having very small interest. The Cuckoo and the Nightiiis^ale has a little, 
chiefly from its possible connection with The Oivl and the Nightingale, and its 
possible influence on Milton's first sonnet later. It is now attributed by the 
Separatists to one Sir Thomas Clanvowe. 



CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 



on these principles are denied to him by another. A calculus which 
brings out contradictory results is not quite a calculus to accept with- 
out reservation. 

B. The second and much stronger is that the malcontents 
practically beg the question. They exclude certain work from con- 
sideration to get at Chaucer's rhymes ; they draw an inference from 
the remainder ; and then they argue back to the excluded parts and 
declare them not genuine, when they have not themselves been 
allowed to give evidence. We might as well exclude the '"classical" 
experiments in the appendix to Enoch Arden, because there is no 
trace of such scansion in the mass of Tennyson's voluminous 
work. 

But the third argument, and by far the strongest of all, is 
this : — 

C. If a poem be in metre, rhyme, or language distinctly older 
than its alleged author's time, then it may fairly be pronounced not 
his, unless the habits of the age permit the supposition of deliberate 
archaism. But if it be younger, no argument can be founded upon 
that fact alone, because copyists may always have been responsible 
for the modernisation. And as a matter of fact we have but one 
MS. for the Court of Love and none for The Floiver and the Leaf — 
facts of which the importance cannot be exaggerated. 

These arguments do not appear to me to have received sufficient 
answer, and they are therefore put on record here, with the 
caution that I do not by any means assert that Chaucer wrote the 
English Rose, or The Flower and the Leaf or the Court of Love. 
There is not evidence enough for that.^ Moreover, Chaucer can do 
more than well without the poems, and the poems are quite pretty 
enough to stand by themselves.^ If The Flower and the Leaf is 
middle fifteenth century, the Court of Love early sixteenth, as the 
prevailing opinion holds, supported by at least a general consensus 
of the chief authorities in the philological treatment of English, then 
there are two unknown English poets of those two dates who have 
each left nothing else, and who w-ere not every-day poets. 

The works which, by the severest modern criticism, are left as 
indisputably Chaucer's are as follows : — ~ 

1 There is even evidence, of a much stronger kind than that on which the 
Separatists rely, against it. For instance, it may fairly be questioned whether 
Chaucer would have compared grass to "green wool," as the author of The 
Floiocr and the Leaf is made to do. He was the less Chaucer for the time if he 
did. 

2 The Flower and the Leaf is put by the Separatists about 1440, in the dead 
waste and middle of the night of English poetry ; the Court of Love at about 1500, 
when that night saw only the broken dreams of Hawes and the cockcrow of 
Skelton. 



CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 121 

A translation (whether it be in whole, in part, or in no part, that 
still existing) of the Roman de la Rose. 

A considerable body of Minor Poems, original and translated — 
The Book of tJie Duchess, The Complaints of Mars and 
Venus, The Parliametit of Fowls, An{n)elida and Arciie, g^uine^ 
with about a score of short pieces, ballads, and what not. ^°'^''- 

The House of Faine. 

The Legend of Good Women. 

Troilus and Cressid. 

The Canterbury Tales. 

Besides the prose translation of Boethius and the Treatise 071 the 
Astrolabe, which will be dealt with in the next chapter but one. 

Further, an ingenious, and by no means improbable, though not 
absolutely certain, theory has divided all this work into three Periods 
— in the first of which, represented by the Romaunt of the Rose and 
most of the minor poems, French influence predominates ; in the 
second of which this is exchanged for Italian, as shown in Troilus 
(adapted from Boccaccio), the House of Fame (at least possibly 
suggested by Dante), and the first draft of the Knigld^s 
Tale (again from Boccaccio) ; while in the third, of which Tjeriods^^ 
the Canterbury Tales are the great outcome, the poet, 
except for themes and motives merely, discards all foreign influence 
and becomes substantially English, though retaining his literary 
scholarship, both in the modern literary tongues, French and Italian, 
and the ancient, his proficiency in the latter as fai' as Latin is con- 
cerned being very considerable, and extending not merely to the com- 
pilations of the Dark and Middle Ages, but to a very fair share of 
the Classics jDroper. This arrangement corresponds very well with 
the known procession of the facts of Chaucer's life and with the 
probabilities of the case, but it is, to use the word which Mr. Matthew 
Arnold godfathered in English, "facultative," it can be taken or 'left; 
the examination of the work itself is necessary. 

The translation of the Roman de la Rose, though it is incomplete 
and stops far short of the enormous length of the French original, 
yet extends to the very respectable number of 7700 lines, in octo- 
syllabic couplets. One great literary reason for accepting it as 
Chaucer's lies in the nature and conduct of these octosyllables. We 
have seen that, as was unavoidable, they were early imitated from 
• French, and were for some time the favourite romance-metre, though 
they gradually gave jDlace to more complicated arrangements, especi- 
ally the six- or twelve-lined stanza, with sixes at regular intervals 
between the eights. Before Chaucer, however, the octosyllabic 
couplet, in its stricter form, had not been well mastered by English 
» writers, who either availed themselves more or less of the license of 



CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 



equivalence (which at its full stretch gives us the Cliristabcl rhythm) 
or else fell, as indeed most French mediasval writers themselves fell, 
into a staccato stiffness on the one hand or an over-fluent and in- 
significant sing-song on the other. We shall find that Chaucer's 
exceedingly ingenious and scholarly contemporary Gower did not 
avoid this latter danger. But in the English Roviaimt of the Rose a 
distinct command of the measure is observable, not 
'^^f fhe"Rosf/^'^^^^^ ^'^^'^^ to the same extent as in the probably later 
House of Fame (one of the capital examples of the 
metre in English), but sufficiently like that and sufficiently unlike 
others to justify the attribution of the two to the same hand. Fortu- 
nately the English includes the whole of the first part of the original 
— that written by Wiiliam of Lorris — and it renders very well the 
exquisite touch of that original, uniting as it does the languid charm 
of moonlight and dream with the fresh vividness of morning and 
movement. Nor need we very bitterly regret the loss of a version of 
the far more prosaic pedantries and pleasantries of Jean de Meung. 

Of the Minor Poems, all display in various ways the learning, and 
in different stages and degrees the accomplishment of language and 
metre, which make Chaucer so delightful, while some have interest 
certain or probable of a biographical or historical kind. 
^'poems°"^ The Book of the Duchess, for example, which is cer- 
tainly . on the death of Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, 
first wife of John of Gaunt, gives us a date — she died in 1369 — and 
has been — on the 1340 theory of the poet's birth — plausibly 
enougli conjectured to be one of his earliest works, the Complaint 
of Pity (which appears to enshrine some unlucky love affair) being 
perhaps earlier still. The Book is in octosyllables much less perfect 
than those of the Romaunt, and evidently the work of a novice, 
while its substance is rather clumsily made up of classicism and 
allegory in the less happy manner of the Rose itself. Chaucer''s 
A B C (a sort of acrostic in which each stanza opens with a letter of 
the alphabet in order) is said to have been written for the same 
Blanche. These stanzas are eight-lined {ababbcbc), religious in tone, 
and of no great poetical merit. Much better in the eyes of literature, 
if not in those of morality, are the Complaints of Mars and Venus. 
In the first, and probably in both, the well-known story is applied to 
personages who are pretty certainly identified with John Holland, 
Earl of Huntingdon and Duke of Exeter, and Isabel of Castile,- 
daughter of Peter the Cruel, and wife of Edmund Duke of York, son 
of Edward III. Isabel was more famous for beauty than for strict 
propriety of conduct. But there is no open attribution in the poem, 
and the "Venus" part at any rate was translated or adapted from a_^ 
French original l)y Otcs de Granson. The Complaint of Pity, Quee«*mi 



i 



CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 123 

Annelida^ and the Farliainent of Fowls are all mainly in the 
seven-lined stanza ababbcc, which was Chaucer's favourite among 
these combinations, and which acquired the name of rhyme-royal 
perhaps from that circumstance, though the usual explanation is that 
it was because of the use of the stanza in the King's Quair. 

Of these three poems, the Complaint, though the least accomplished 
in form, is genuine in tone ; and Queen Annelida, though ostensibly 
fiction, rings as of a personal sorrow. But the Parliament or 
Assembly of Fowls is by far the best of the three, and indeed of all 
the minor poems. Here in the very opening — 

The life so short, the craft so long to learn, 

The essay so hard, so sharp the conquering, 

The dreadful joys always that flit so yerne [eagerly], 

All this mean I by love — 

we feel at once the grip, the thrill, the sense of mastery and mystery 
which are so rare in earlier poetry. And the rest of the piece, which 
some would have to show already Italian influence, announces 
Chaucer quite unmistakably in the catalogue of trees afterwards 
copied by Spenser — 

The builder oak and eke the hardy ash — 

and that other of the birds themselves. These catalogues he was 
fond of applying afresh in various forms and matters, and they dis- 
play his then unexampled, and seldom since a2)proached, still 
seldomer outdone, faculty of making the epithet fit the noun, and 
transforming the bald enumerations which are one of the curses of 
mediaeval poetry into broad and varied examples at once of keen 
observation and masterly expression. 

The smaller poems do not seem to require any very special 
notice. Some of the ballads, such as the newl^ recovered one To 
Rosamond, are pretty; the late and %?A'" Ftee*^- from the Press 
has dignity and truth ; and others are interesting. But Chaucer, 
who was for so great a poet curiously deficieiit in strictly lyrical gift, 
shows better in long poems than ^in short,' ai¥d better in narration 
than in reflection. Indeed, it^is scarce^ wrong to say that, as 
regards the tone and afi^tance of liis' work, he is rather a dramatist 
and a novelist than a p'oet, though he applied to the subjects which, 
there being as yet no nove^akd no play, he treated in poetic form, 
an unsurpassed-^.- and rarel}»*>equalled power of poetic expression... 
His expression is the expression of the poet; his thought '^^- '' . ..g.-iY'"^ 
of the dramatist or novelisti 

Hence it is — a matter nire and certainly not to be grumbled at — 
that, as has been just remarked, his long poems are better than 



124 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi 

his short. In the long poems of his supposed middle period he was 
indeed still hardly out of leading-strings — or rather he chose to wear 

them, for Troilns and Cressid is translation in little 
^^Cre"sid'"^ more than name, the House of Fame owes nothing 

more than hints to its original, and the Legend of Good 
Women handles the classical stories, which it takes chiefly from Ovid, 
with nearly as much freedom as that shown in the Canterbury 7 ales 
themselves. 

Each of the three has a charm of its own, and Troilns has the 
additional one of forming a link in a chain of writing on the same 
subject by a succession of writers all eminent in the history of litera- 
ture, and most of tliem possessing far more than merely historical 
importance. The figure of Cressida (Briseida, Griseida, etc.), which 
the trouvere Benoit de Sainte-More had extracted from the dustbin of 
Dares and had partially, but only partially, vivified, jjassed, a very 
little further modernised, into the Historia Trojana (mostly pillaged 
from Benoit) of Guido Colonna or delle Colonne at the end of the 
thirteenth century. Hence Boccaccio in his Filostrato, applying 
his genius as a novelist and his talent as a poet, took Cressid, but 
made her something" far more interesting than the passive love- 
thrall of Benoit. Chaucer, in turn taking her from Boccaccio, 
softened and complicated her traits a little, but added to the story 
the wonderfully vivid and individual figure of Pandarus. Chaucer's 
Scottish follower, Henryson, not meddling with his master's actual 
matter, completed the story unequally, but with marvellous touches 
in parts, by the Testament of Cressid in the fifteenth century ; Shake- 
speare in the sixteenth dramatised, with variations, the Chaucerian 
part ; and Dryden in the seventeenth refashioned Shakespeare. 
Perhaps there is no other instance in literary history of so many 
persons of such distinction taking and handing on the same torch so 
long. Nor need we hesitate to give Chaucer's own contribution to 
the series the credit of the most accomplished long poem yet written 
in English. The rhyme-royal stanzas are thoroughly beaten out; 
the passionate side of Cressid's character is fully developed, yet 
with a delicacy which is not always associated with the idea of 
Chaucer ; the comic, and yet not farcical presentation of Pandarus is 
the first of its kind in English ; and the scene where the lovers are 
made happy, tliough somewhat too much elaborated (as indeed is the 
whole poem) with the " Court of Love " scholasticism of the time, is 
••> masterpiece. Nothing but want of technical originality and a certain 
zkj:>v^h. .,^f incident could be charged against Troilns. and the first 
of these charges, as we have seen, is more formally than really true. 

The House of Fame, a much shorter poem, in rather more J 
than 2000 lines of octosyllabic couplet, adds to the presentation of-^ 



CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 125 

Chaucer as master by this time of whatsoever metre he chose to 
adopt, and strengthens the suggestion (already given by Pandarus) 
of his peculiar and hitherto unexampled humour. The 
piece is one of the dreams, curiously compounded of ^he //o«j^ of 
learning, satire, and other things, which flowed from the 
never-failing fountain of the Rose for some three centuries ; and it 
affords opportunity for much shrewd criticism of life. But the most 
Chaucerian touches of all, perhaps, are put in the mouth of the eagle 
who carries the poet up to Heaven to see the House. This eagle is 
a very humorous as well as powerful fowl, and his remonstrances 
with the wriggling bard at his being so " noyous " to carry, together 
with his cool, dry comfort and reassurance against any danger of his 
burden's being made cupbearer to the Gods, or '• stellified " or other- 
wise inconveniently honoured, exhibit the English thing called 
Humour in almost as full development as the Canterbury Talcs 
themselves. 

The Legend of Good Women, besides the general interest of all 
Chaucer's verse, besides its own intrinsic attraction (for the "good 
women " are the most hapless and blameless of Ovid's Heroides), and 
the remembrance of its suggestion of what is perhaps, 
all things considered, the most perfect example of Tenny- Good'women 
son's verse,^ has the additional charm of presenting to 
us Chaucer's first experiment in the heroic couplet, the main pillar, 
with blank verse, of later English poetry, and the medium of his 
own greatest work. The faint foreshadowings of this in earlier verse, 
the ways in which the uncertain crystallisation of our prosody now 
takes this form, now loses it again, have been already indicated. 
But, as is generally the case when a poet of the first genius hits upon 
a metre of the first importance, the thing, after being almost unbodied, 
certainly embryonic, in its first appearance, presents itself practically 
full-grown. The pathetic subjects of the Legend do not indeed give 
tlie author much opportunity for showing that marvellous suitableness 
of the form for comic portraiture and description which the Canterbury 
Tales display. But it is noticeable that he opens the collection 
with one of those ironic or agnostic, rather than positively sceptical, 
references to things beyond the present life which are found elsewhere 
{eg. in the Knighfs Tale), and which indeed may be said without 
parodox to form not so much a reaction from the piety of the Middle 
Ages as a complement or even an integral part of it. After this and 

1 1 read, before my eyelids dropt their .shade, 
" The Legend of Good Women," long agu 
Sung by the morning star of song, ^^ ho mac'.e 
His music heard below. 
i A Dream of Fair Women. 



126 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi 

some of that passionate praise of the Daisy which, common as it is 
in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poetry, always, or ahiiost always, 
hides or discloses alfection for some living Margaret, one of the usual 
allegorical overtures (here specially interesting because it refers to 
the poet's own works) conveys a rebuke to him from the God of Love 
and Alcestis his servant for the sacrilegious remarks contained in the 
Rose and in Troiliis. So he undertakes a palinode, and tells in turn 
of Cleopatra and htr faithfulness to Antony, of Thisbe and Dido, of 
Hypsipyle and Medea, how true they were to the false Jason, of 
Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomene (Philomela), Phillis, and Hypermnestra 
— all examples of truth, deserved or undeserved, in woman. It is 
pleasant, as it always is, to receive the old classical stories set out 
with the new romantic charm, but the chief attraction of the poem is 
the new-born metre — the strength, command, and freshness which 
Chaucer shows in it, his penetration at once of the secrets of eitjainbe- 
iiienl or o\erlapping, of paragraph arrangement, of the merits of a 
full stop at the end of the first line of a couplet, his mastery of lift 
and swing, the eddying internal swirl, and yet the constant onward 
progress of his "whole rhythm. 

The most like in tone to the Legend of all the minor poems are 
the chief " doubtfuls," the Court of Love and The Flower and the 
Leaf, though they are in the Chaucerian stanza or rhyme-royal, not in 
heroics, and though the Court of Love expresses the libel as well as 
tlie palinode. It is difficult to say which of the two is the more 
charming — the Court of Love with its statutes half ironical, half 
passionate, and the delightful concert of the birds at the end, with 
their amorous descants founded on psalm-motives ; or the dreamlike 
vision of Tlie L'lower and the Leaf, with the white and green parties of 
Diana and Flora, and the fantastic allegory of a not extravagant 
virginity. Of tlie two, the sentiment is the more Chaucerian in the 
Court of Love, the expression and arrangement in The Flower and 
the Leaf. Perhaps the best argument for the non-Chaucerian author- 
ship is that if they be later they take away the almost unintelligible 
reproach of England during the ensuing century. 

There is, however, no doubt that common fame has even more 

than that measure of reason which (to do her the justice too seldom 

done) she often, though not always, has in such cases in considering 

Chaucer as the poet of the Canterbury Tales. In these 

^y^ '-"n'f'^' we have not only his most considerable work (even if the 

ttiiry lales. ■' ^ 

English Rose be wholly his) in bulk ; not only his latest ; 
not o..!^ work which includes in one i5art or another of it all the 
merits and beauties which can be discerned elsewhere, but work dis- 
playing a variety and a vigour nowhere else to be found, as well as 
evidences of original genius which do not appear even in the best of 



CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 127 

the other works. Although the Decameron may have furnished the 
bare suggestion of alternate tale-telling, although many, perhaps 
most, of the tales are founded in subject, and even in some details 
of treatment, on previous work, classical, Italian, or French, yet the 
whole as a whole is distinctly " new and original " in a very different 
.sense from that of the play-bills. The entire framework, and very 
much of the inset tales, is studied directly from the English life of 
the time : the gracious lunar rainbows of the Rose have given place 
to sunlight ; the abstractions of scholastic philandering retire in 
favour of beings of flesh and blood. For Dangler and Bialacoil, 
even for Cressid, the fair, frail type, and Troilus, the amoureux tt'cinsi of 
all time, we have the bouncing Wife of Bath and the mincing Prioress, 
the stout carle of a Miller, and the Summoner as full of reality as he 
is wanting in delicacy. Even the pieces like the famous Knight's 
Tale, which, like the earlier poems, are taken from others, and deal 
with literary tradition rather than with English contemporary fact, 
wear a new guise and breathe a new spirit. We pass from con- 
vention to direct impression and expression, from pageantry to 
conduct, from allegory to fact. There is not less art ; there is, in 
fact, more art than ever, but there is infinitely more matter, and 
the matter and the art have not the slightest difficulty in joining 
hands. 

We must neglect as usual, or at least notice only by reference, a 
great deal of the matter which a praiseworthy zeal has accumulated 
in reference to the Canterbiny Tales. It is evident on the face of it 
that they were not finished, and it is very probable that the successive 
instalments were never arranged even in a provisional order by the 
author. Industrious editors have accordingly, by the help of the 
Prologue, the interpreted introductions, and other real or imaginary 
hints, regrouped the tales, calculated how many more were to be told, 
and adjusted the stages of the journey. This is good matter for 
whoso likes it ; whoso does not, may neglect it without scathe or 
demur. It is, however, not unimportant to bear in mind that, as the 
sure evidences of style and metre show, the book represents work of 
very different periods, and probably includes not a little which was 
originally composed without a distinct view to the whole scheme as 
we have it. 

The simplest literary facts, as distinguished from what classical 
scholars call '• hariolations," are that the Canterbury Tales consist 
of about seventeen thousand and odd lines of verse, and two piej'",", 
the Tale of Melibee and the Parson'' s Tale, of prose, the foimcr hav- 
ing, in parts, odd indications or remnants of blank verse in it. The 
poetical part is, with the exception of the burlesque romaunt of Sir 
Thopas, either in rhymed couplets of the kind just described or 



128 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi 

in stanza. It is divided in point of matter into a prologue, which 
describes the cavalcade of the Pilgrims to the shrine of Becket, and 
depicts each in a series of wonderful vignettes or kit-cat portraits. 
There are, besides Sir Thopas and the two prose tales, twenty-one 
tales in verse of very different lengths, ranging from the two thousand 
lines of the KnighVs Tale to mere fragments like the Cook's. Between 
the Tales there are lesser prologues which keep up the framework, 
and very commonly, if not invariably, display the dramatic power of 
the author, and his intensely vivid observation of contemporary life 
at their highest. In point of subject, the Tales now vary in the 
widest and freest manner. The Knight's Tale is a regular romance 
of chivalry, not on the smallest scale, and belonging to the antique 
matter. So is the Man of Law's Tale, which handles in rhyme-royal 
a variant of the story of Emare (p. 96). So is the Clerk's, which 
tells the story of Griselda (rhyme-royal) ; the Squire's, which "' leaves 
half told The story of Cambuscan bold." The Prioress, the Monk, 
and the Nun sedately tell legends of Saint Cecilia, of Hugh of 
Lincoln, or moralised stories of Scriptural or classical lore. All 
the rest zrt fabliaux oi one kind or another — that is to say, Englishings, 
in the most original and least second-hand fashion, of the peculiar 
verse-stories, often, but not always, distinctly " free " in incident and 
language, and almost always containing a more or less satirical 
criticism of life, which had become popular in France about two 
centuries before. 

The prologues are equally various in length and in immediate 
subject, though the tone is pretty much the same in all. The longest, 
the most famous, and on the whole the happiest, is the celebrated 
discourse of the Wife of Bath, which suggested Dunbar's only less 
brilliant (though more bitter) The Twa Mary it Weinen and the IVedo, 
and which, like it, is bitter satire on women put into the mouth of 
a woman, and arranged there with the curiously artful faculty of 
making the speaker unconsciously a self-satirist. All these prologues 
are full of direct and personal touches, and, with their prior, the opening 
piece, contain such a gallery of pictures from the life as no mediaeval 
writer had ever attempted. The last Shakespearian touch — that which 
at once makes a character personal and individual for all time, and 
conveys to it the abiding characteristics of humanity whicli belong 
to no time in particular — is indeed not quite Chaucer's. His characters 
are rather astonishingly brilliant types, individualised by the freshness 
- rl sharpness of the impression, than absolutely individual persons. 
It was indeed almost impossible, till the clutch of allegory had been 
finally shaken off, that the complete tyranny of the type should be 
shaken off likewise. But no poets' characters that still partake of 
the type are so free from its drawbacks and blemishes as Chaucer's ; 



CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 129 

and many as are the great English humourists who have followed 
him, hardly one has succeeded in making more out of humour. This 
naturally shows itself in the comic tales and in the prologues, but 
it is not absent anywhere — not in the stately chivalry of the Knight's 
Tale, not in the pathos of the stories of Constance and Griselda. 

Next to this almost omnipresent humour the great feature of the 
Canterbury Tales is the extraordinary vividness and precision of the pre- 
sentment of images, whether complicated or simple. Of the former, the 
poem bears in its very forefront — in the figures of the prologue and 
the temple-descriptions of the Knighfs Tale — unsurpassed instances. 
And in such phrases as the famous 

Smiler, with the knife under the cloak, 

we meet, and meet almost for the first time, that gift of putting 
niitltiun in parvo which only the greatest men of letters, perhaps in 
perfection only the greatest poets, possess. Pursuing this faculty 
still closer, we can bring it down, in at least some instances, to that 
unsurpassed power of making the epithet suit the noun which has 
been noticed already. It is evident, and interestingly evident, that 
this magical power of Chaucer's own words impressed, as it deserved 
to impress, his contemporaries and scholars more than anything 
else. His astonishing command of " rhetorique " (which the next age 
uWuckily endeavoured to rival by searching for the most '• aureate " 
words instead of the most appropriate) , his " gold dewdrops of speech," 
were then the things that struck them most. It is true that, even 
in the Canterbury Tales, he has not quite escaped the curse of the 
cliche, of the expletive. But he has it far less than his predecessors, 
and often for long passages he escapes it altogether. 

Lastly (for even Chaucer must be handled summarily here), we 
perceive in the Canterbury Tales the completion of his command of 
verse. On the subject of this verse there are many opinions, which 
often depend on preconceived theories. The old seventeenth- and 
eighteenth-century notion that he could not scan is, of course, now 
held by no instructed person. But there are some who hold that 
Chaucer allowed himself nine-syllable lines, and others, or the same, 
that he adhered to a strictly decasyllabic basis, as, it is pretty certain, 
his immediate successors tried (in their floundering attempts to follow 
him) to do. My own opinion is that, although Chaucer had not, as 
till after the great dramatic period it was practically impossible for 
any man to do, realised the full powers of equivalence in the English 
decasyllabic, and the full advantage derivable from extending the 
license of pause to every place, he had yet made great strides in this 
direction. I believe that wherever only nine syllables, even with the 

K 



I30 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book ni 

final e, occur, there is probably ^ a fault in the reading ; that there are 
occasional Alexandrines ; and that, although in many instances " the " 
or " to " was intended to coalesce with a succeeding initial vowel, 
there are also instances of unquestionable trisyllabic feet. I am quite 
sure that the balance of the verse is managed with an almost (not 
perhaps a complete) freedom from that prejudice about the middle 
pause which, derived from the antediluvian prosody of Anglo-Saxon, 
and accidentally strengthened by the caesura of French and Latin 
verse, weighed even upon some Elizabethans, and has never been 
entirely shaken off by a few, even among artists and scholars in 
verse, to the present day. And I am sure also that this mobile and 
sensitive prosody is the second, just as the inexhaustible freshness 
and propriety of his phrase is the first, great secret of the fact that 
Chaucer is the earliest English poet who can, without reservations and 
allowances, be called great, and, what is more, one of our greatest, 
even to the present day. 

1 I insert this " probably " because, though I think that the nine-syllable line 
is never, even in Chaucer or in Milton, a success, I think it just possible that 
Chaucer, as it is most probable that Milton, may have tried it, deceived by the 
analogy of the octosyllable. 



CHAPTER II 



LANGLAND AND GOWER 



Piers Ploivman — Argument of the B Poem — Gower — The Confessio Amaritis — 
Govver's reputation 

Almost exactly contemporary with Chaucer were two other poets, 
both of more than ordinary mark — one of them Chaucer's own equal, 
if not superior, in intensity, though far his inferior in range and in 
art, both curious contrasts in more ways than one with him, and with 
each other. The first was the author of the Vision of Piers the 
Howman ; the second was John Gower. 

The now generally accepted identification of the first with William 
Langley or Langland (the latter being the preferred form) rests on 
no very definite evidence, but it has fair probability in its favour. 
And the adoption of it (with a caution) saves us from the incon- 
venience of constantly using a clumsy periphrasis for a person who 
will have to be often named. It is well, however, to stop short of 
the further adventurousness of identifying all the personal details 
that can be got out of the Vision with Langland himself — of giving 
him a wife named "Kitty," and a daughter named "Calote" (Colette ? 
Nicolette ?), of placing him in London, of conferring on him those 
minor orders which did not necessarily comport celibacy, and so 
forth. Once more the " prosaic heresy," as we may conveniently 
call that which takes poetic and dramatic utterances for statements 
of biographical fact, is to be sedulously eschewed. The allusion to 
Malvern Hills in the opening of all versions of the poem is less 
questionable, though it is even here to be observed that the famous 
and almost proverbial extent of the view therefrom would make it a 
fitting imagined scene for the sort of survey of England which was 
coming. But fair presumption, though not certainty, may be drawn 
from the facts that the varying legends about Langland's birth 
locate it either at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire, or at Wychwood 
in Oxfordshire, both of which, though at opposite sides, may be said 

131 



132 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi 

to be in the remoter Malvern precincts, and that the dialect of the 
poem is said to be West Midland. 

Its extreme popularity is shown by the great number of MSS. which 
remain of \t,^ and by the earliness, if not the number, of the printed 
editions.'^ It went out of favour in the late seventeenth and eighteenth 

centuries, neither more nor less than other books of its 
Phwman. ^^^^ ^"d time ; but it was recalled to attention rather 

earlier than most of them by Whitaker's edition (1813), 
the editio pru^cps of the " C " or longest text. Not, however, till 
the more thormigh study of it during the last thirty years, in which 
Professor Skeat has been the main worker, was it discovered that this 
" C " text was not the only variant on the accepted or " B " text which 
had up to that time been printed.^ There are, in fact, three families 
of MSS., comparison of which has established, as fairly as such things 
can be established, the fact that the poem' was rehandled by its 
author with remarkable thoroughness at two separate times after the 
appearance of the first version ; that that first version itself was not the 
receptus or B, but an earlier, shorter A ; and that this earliest version, 
from allusions in it, may very probably have been written as early as 
1362. The B or main text is similarly assigned to 1377 or there- 
abouts, and the C or longest to 1393, or thirty years after text A. 
Yet further, if Langland was, as seems extremely likely, the author of 
the alliterative poem on the deposition of Richard II., which Dr. 
Skeat calls Richard the Redeless, he must have been alive in 1399. 
This would give him a literary life of not much less than forty years, 
and assuming, as we may fairly do (for there are no marks of extreme 
juvenility even in the first version), that he was about thirty when he 
wrote it, this would carry his life from about 1330 to about 1400. 
The latter, it is to be remembered, is the year of Chaucer's death 
pretty certainly, while if the first version of Piers Plowman dates 

1 The " A" form {vide infra) appears in the great Vernon Collection (see p. 107). 
Professor Skeat — whose repeated studies and editions of the poem culminated 
in the issue (2 vols. Clarendon Press) which is uniform with his Chaucer, and 
ranks as the standard — enumerates nearly fifty others. 

2 1550, in three different forms, and 1561. Spenser, who refers to the poem 
in the Shepherds Calendar, must have read one of these, unless his allusion at the 
end of December is, as some have thought, to the Plowman's Talc. This is to the 
last degree unlikely, as, if he knew this at all, he would have known it as Chaucer's 
with whose works it was then printed, and Chaucer has been already disjunctively 
referred to in the preceding line. 

3 Among others by Wright 1842, revised 1856, and again reprinted 1887, 
This edition (to which Professor Skeat does that justice by which he is so admi- 
rably distinguished in comparison with too many so-called scholars when they deal 
with predecessors) would be the best of all for general reading, if it were not 
printed in half lines. It also contains Piers Plowman's Creed, an ill-tempered but 
vigorous Wyclifite lampoon in some 850 lines, which the critics will not allow to 
be Langland's, though they put it as early as 1394. 



CHAP. II LANGLAND AND GOWER 133 

from the year mentioned above, it is earlier by some years than any- 
thing that we can date with probability as among the still existing 
works of Chaucer. 

At first sight nothing can well be more ditTerent, not merely from 
the Canterbury Tales, but from all Chaucer's work, than the Vision 
concerning Piers the Plowman. It is in alliterative verse, according 
to the revived form of that rhythm so often mentioned in the last 
Book. The lines are tolerably equal in length, and they not un- 
frequently fall — urged by the inevitable pressure of the^rowth of the 
language and the literature — into Alexandrines, fourteeners, and 
other constructively metrical shapes. But they do not aim. at any 
such structure, they rigidly abstain from rhyme, and they derive 
their whole poetical form from the middle pause, the fairly corre- 
sponding accents, and the three alliterated words, two in the first half 
and one in the second. ^ The appearance of much greater antiquity 
than Chaucer's which this gives, and which used to mislead the 
unwary, is assisted by a somewhat greater allowance of archaic 
words. But it is entirely false that, as used also to be said, Langland 
is more ** Saxon " in his vocabulary than Chaucer. It has even been 
calculated by patient industry that his percentage of Latin and 
Romance words is, if anything, a little larger than Chaucer's ; it is quite 
certain that if both were printed in modernised spelling, it would be at 
once seen not to be smaller. 

The poem, despite its merit and the pains that have been spent on 
it of late years by interpreters, is by no means a very easy one to 
understand ; and there are few that are more in need of an argument 
or a running marginal commentary. This arises from the fact that 
it is not one vision, nor even two, but a series of visions dissolving one 
into the other, often without any more attempt at coherence — of 
completion even in the dream-integer, such as it is — than actual 
dreams exhibit. It would seem as if the author, whether owing to 
his mysticism and its accompanying vagueness, or to his satiric 
intent, and the wholesome sense of danger which accompanied that, 
deliberately avoided rounding off his chapters and driving home his 
meanings. But the general scheme of the poem, which is divided 
mio passus- or cantos, is as follows in the central or B text. 

A prologue of rather more than two hundred lines tells how the 
Dreamer, in " a summer season when soft was the sun," put on a 

1 Langland sometimes indulges in four, but I think never puts himself out of 
the way for them, or for the extravagant and overloaded alliteration of five or 
even six words which we find elsewhere. 

- Of these A has twelve (perhaps originally only eight), B twenty, and C 
twenty-three ; but even where the three, or two of them, coincide there are often 
great variations. Wright's B text — Professor Skeat does not number his con- 
tinuously — has 14,696 short or half lines. 



134 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book iii 

shepherd's smock like "a hermit unholy of works," and wandering 
on Malvern Hills, slept by a brook side, and saw a strange vision — a 

high tower (Heaven) on one side, a deep dungeon (Hell) 
the^B Poem, beneath, and a " fair field full of folk " between (Middle 

Earth). And he describes the folk and their occupations 
with much verve, digressing, in the bewildering kaleidoscopic fashion 
which characterises the whole poem, to a very shrewd and early vision 
of the " Bell-the-Cat " story. Indeed, no simile is at once so apposite 
or so illumi«|tive for Piers Pluwinati as that of the kaleidoscope, 
in respect o^he way in which elaborate arrangements of word and 
thought suddenly and without warning fall into something as elabo- 
rate, but quite different. The first passits proper opens with a promise, 
not too exactly kejit, to expound the meaning of the tower, dungeon, 
and field ; and their obvious interpretations are given by a lovely lady 
in linen clothed, who is Holy Church. Her speech is allegorical and 
digressive in the Rose manner — indeed, different as is his spirit, 
Langland is as fall of the Rose inspiration as Chaucer himself. The 
second passiis introduces — in sharp contrast to this figure, and in 
answer to the Dreamer's request to be told of Falsehood as she has 
said so much of Truth — another lady far more gorgeously clothed. 
This is ''Meed the maid" — reward in the good sense, bribery, etc. 
in the bad — daughter of False (Falsehood), and betrothed to Favel 
(Fauvel, the hero of an allegorical French romance of the preceding 
age, and here signifying Flattery). Here Holy Church vanishes, and 
the current of the story is deflected in the usual odd manner to the 
marriage of Meed, which it is decided ought to take place in London. 
Tlie bridal party set out thither under the escort of Simony and Civil 
Law, but Soothness anticipates them, tells Conscience, who tells the 
King, and a warm reception being prepared for the party, they dis- 
perse, leaving Meed the maid, who stands her ground, weeping. 
She is at the beginning of the third passits courteously taken by the 
middle and brought before the King. The natural seductiveness of 
Meed, and the fact that she tnay be honestly gained, are here glanced 
at. She confesses her sins, uses great largesse to the court 
generally, and the King promises that she shall marry Conscience, 
who, however, refuses utterly, giving his offered bride the worst pos- 
sible character, and belabouring her with Latin quotations, against 
which she very naturally and indignantly protests. At the beginning 
of the fourth /^jj';/i' this uncompromising knight declines even to kiss 
her, "but Reason rede me thereto." The King thereupon bids him 
fetch Reason, who comes, supports Conscience, and brings over the 
King, who at the end of the fytte saj-s "As long as our life lasteth 
live we together." 

At the beginning of the fifth passiis the dream is l)roken and 



ciiAF. 11 LANGLAND AND GOWER 135 

once more joined. A notice of the Rule of Reason leads or falls, 
after the media:;val fashion, into a long and vigorous passage on the 
Seven Deadly Sins, containing one of the most famous and brightly 
coloured passages of the poem, the description of a London tavern 
and the bibbers there. Only at the end of this passus, which 
includes some curious anticipations of Puritan nomenclature, does the 
personage who gives name to the poem, Piers the Plowman, make his 
appearance ; and even then he has a double portion of the floating 
phantasmagoric character that marks the whole. At oae moment he 
is a simple plowman who digs and delves, and does what Truth 
might, who has often an acre to ear, and cannot leave his work. But 
he is also a guide to Godliness, and has a wife Dame Work-while-it-is- 
time, a daughter •' Do-right-or-thy-dame-shall-beat-thee," and a son 
with a longer title still. After dialogues and doings in the sixth 
with Hunger and others, he emerges in the seventh passtis as Christ 
Himself, opposing the venal priests of the day, and teaching a better 
way to salvation. This is a sort of epilogue to the passiis, and to the 
first part of the poem, which resolves itself in the Dreamer's own words 
into a counsel to seek the help of •• Do-well." 

But where is ''Do-well "to be found.'' That is the question with 
which the eighth passiis ^ opens, and the second part of the poem. 
Certain friars, though they are quite sure he dwells among them, give 
no help, and a fresh dream brings to the poet's side Thought, who 
informs him that not only Do-well but '• Do-bet "(ter) and Do-best 
must be sought. But he cannot tell where to find them, though Wit 
may. Wit in the ninth passus is prodigal of information about the 
three, about their relation to Lady Anima, and about the fact that 
Do-well is Obedience, Do-bet Love, and Active Benevolence Do-best. 
In the tenth passtts Study the wife of Wit takes up the tale and con- 
fuses the Dreamer "sternly staring" with more theology, sending 
him moreover to Clergy, who talks still more (" This is a long 
lesson," says the Dreamer, " and little am I wiser. Darkly ye show 
where Do-well is or Do-bet"), and to Scripture, who similarly occupies 
the eleventh. Kind and Reason follow, and at the end of this 
passus the Dreamer, thoroughly bemused, meets one of the most 
original characters of the whole shadowy procession, Ymaginatif — 
his own mother-wit apparently, or human reason, not antithetic to 
but stopping short of theology. The thirteenth adds others, especially 
" Hawkyn - the Active Man," who cannot keep his clothes unspotten 
for his daily work — an allegory more open than some. Hawkyn 
discourses with Patience throughout this passus and the next, the 

l-jjJl^ ""nten-i, it mirt !"■& rf'"f"'''""''P^' ^'•'^ t''"se of the B tfext: in ft ^y^ 
^iJIil'J.isJii&J.tjMt&^ and jn C. the I'.h^venth. 
^ Hawkyn=Henrykin= Harry. 



136 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi 

fourteenth, but the Dreamer, waking yet again at the beginning of the 
fifteenth, renews, and with reason, his wailing how it was wonder long 
ere he could kindly know Do-well. Nor in the long fifteenth passus, 
though according to the title " Do-well " is finished and " Do-bet " 
begun, can the process be said to be at all clear or satisfactory. We 
find, however, that the scholastic allegory of the last five passus is 
passing into simple Scripture-history and Christian teaching, and in the 
sixteenth Piers Plowman reappears, while both this passus and the 
seventeenth shape themselves more and more into a plain life of Christ 
Himself, leading in the eighteenth to the finest poetry of the whole — a 
splendid paraphrase of the Entry into Jerusalem, the Passion, and the 
Harrowing of Hell. This completes Do-bet = Love = Christ, and 
" Incipit Do-best ^^ which also occupies the last or twentieth. But 
this is the vaguest and most unfinished part of the whole, Piers 
Plowman after Christ's death seeming to become the Church, and the 
two cantos leading to no conclusion whatever. 

The so-called A text is much shoi"ter than this. Not only are 
there but twelve passus, the work stopping at the end of the so-called 
Vita de Do-well, but the individual treatment of the different points 
is much less developed. Not a few of the more striking episodes of 
the B text, such as the Bell-the-Cat fable, do not appear. On the 
other hand, there are some things in A which were afterwards left 
out or completely refashioned, including almost the whole of the last 
passus. C is longer even than B, though the extension to twenty- 
three passus is rather misleading, the old Prologue now ranking as 
Passus /., and some of the earlier divisions of B being split up and 
redistributed. And there are again some omissions. These, however, 
are compensated by long insertions, sometimes of the perhaps 
treacherously biographical kind, especially one in Passus VI. on 
which the biography-builders do much rely for Langland's London 
life ; sometimes on " Lolling " and Friardom ; sometimes of the more 
abstract philosophical kind. Indeed this later tendency has dis- 
tinctly got the upper hand in C, as where, for instance, the quaint 
and vivid personality of " Hawkyn the Active Man " is changed into 
a Lorrisian abstraction called " Activa Vita." 

On the whole, the presence of this abstraction in Piers Plowman 
has been too little allowed for by some of its eulogists, who have 
been seduced by the pictorial and dramatic force of the opening of 
the "Meed" scenes and others to put it rather in competition with 
the Pilgrini's Progress ^ than with the Roman de la Rose. There is 

1 Guillaume de Deguillevile, from whose Pclcrhiage dc V Ame Humahic Bunyan, 
througli whatever channel, certainly did derive not a little, was as a dreamer 
before Langland also, just as he was before Chaucer, who adapted from him 
the .-/ D C. 



CHAP. II LANGLAND AND COWER 137 

vivid portraiture in it, and there is a good deal of sharp and practical 
satire. But even in the vision proper to some extent, and in Do-zvell, 
Do-bet, and Do-best to a very much greater, the reflective, tlieological, 
and allegorical side gets altogether the better of the dramatic and 
pictorial. To use the image suggested by the change between B 
and C just noted, Hawkyn the Active Man, who is not always 
present even in the early part, is hardly present at all in the second ; 
and in his place we have pale abstractions arguing and jargoning 
about matters of the first importance in themselves — but ill suited for 
such treatment. 

We cannot therefore put Langland by the side of Chaucer either 
for range, or for directness, or for artistic sense. To say, according 
to the common antithesis of the books, that he is a poet of the 
people, Chaucer one of the court, is very idle. The author of the 
Reeve''s and Miller'^s Tales is hardly to be charged with ignorance in 
respect of the people; and the author of the passtis about Meed the 
Maid would certainly not have thanked his eulogists for presuming 
him to be unfamiliar with the court. But it is true that Chaucer, to 
some extent, represents the Humanist and cosmopolitan distaste for 
politics and for controversial theology, while Langland represents a 
strong turn for both.^ It is true also, though he himself seems to 
have been no Wyclifite or Lollard, that much of the tendency after- 
wards known as Puritan appears in him, and that, to our sorrow, 
the iconoclastic spirit, which was in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries to be the disgrace and curse of England, shows itself in 
angry remarks about church building and the putting up of painted 
windows. Intense, but narrow; pious, but a little Philistine — so we 
must pronounce him. 

Nevertheless he had a great literary talent, which perhaps 
amounted to genius. The literary craftsmanship which succeeds in 
impressing on a form so uncouth as the unrhymed and only faintly 
metred alliterative verse the combination of freedom and order, of 
swing and variety, which marks Piers Plowinati, is of that kind 
which must have distinguished itself whatsoever the form it happened 
to adopt. And although the architectonic gift, which might have en- 
abled the poet to present a real whole instead of a series of dissolving 
views, is not present, yet it is astonishing with how little repugnance 
the reader who has once " got his hand in " accepts this apparent 

1 The politics of Piers Fhnuman itself are pretty distinct ; those of Richard 
the Redeless, the attribution of which to Langland is one of the least doubtful of 
such things, are open to all. The poem (which is to be found in Professor 
Skeat's edition, and as "The Deposition of Richard II." in Wright's Political 
Poems, Rolls Series, i. 368) is incomplete but extremely vigorous, though marred 
by the " Philistine " and ungenerous radicalism which is too frequently English. 



13S CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 



incoherence, and resigns himself to see the visions rise and blend and 
melt, the bubbles swell and gleam and break. While as for the force 
of individual passages — the Prologue, the Fable, the best Court scenes, 
the London Tavern, the Harrowing of Hell — these have never been 
mistaken by any competent critic who has read them.i . 

Beside the shadowy and in part apocalyptic figure of Langland, 
the solid, well-authenticated, somewhat prosaic personality and 
literary work of John Gower^ present a contrast which has its 
interest. Govver, after being wrongly connected by tra- 
dition with more than one family and county, was 
definitely established by Sir Harris Nicolas as John Gower, Esquire, 
of Aldington, in Kent, and of other places. His birth-year is not 
certain ; he died, old and it is said blind, in 1408, and his tomb is 
one of the numerous literary illustrations of the great and recently 
rebuilt church of St. Saviour's, or St. Mary Overy's, Southwark, with 
whicli Gower seems to have been connected in various ways. Indeed, 
though married, he appears to have been in minor orders. 

His literary work even as we have it is considerable, but part of 
it is lost. Part also, both of what exists and of what does not, only 
indirectly concerns us here, being written in languages other than 
English. Gower is the last of the probably not small class of 
English men of letters between 1200 and 1400 who were trilingual 
— writing, and probably speaking, French, Latin, and English with 
equal facility. The principal existing piece of Gower's French is a 
set of fifty Ballades, the favourite French {iiot Provencal) form, with 
intertwisted identical rhymes, a recurrent refrain, and (generally) an 
envoy. But he also wrote in French one of the three divisions of his 
ca])ital work, the Speciilmn Mcditautis, a moral poem, in twelve 
divisions, on Vices and Virtues, which, after being long lost and 
sometimes misidentified. has been at length found and is being edited. 
Anotlier part of this, the Vox Clai/iatitis, also exists, but is in Latin. 
It is a lively political poem in elegiacs with internal rhyme, dealing 
with the disturbance of Richard the Second's reign. Gower was a 
favourite of the unlucky but not unlettered king, and deserted him 
for the rising sun of Bolingbroke. This poem contains a very striking 
sketch of Wat Tyler's rising. Later, as a Lancastrian, the poet wrote 

1 The best commentary on the vtaifcr of Langland is, and is long likely to be, 
M. Jusscrand's L' Epopi-c mystique de W. Langland. 

2 Gower has never been edited as a whole, and it is to be wished that Professor 
Skeat would complete with him the set of Chaucer and Langland. At present 
the Con/cssio is in Chalmers's Pocfs, in a separate edition by Dr. Pauli, and cheaply 
in Professor Morley's Carisbrooke Library. But the Ciii:]iiaiife Balladi's and the 
Vox Clamantis are in Roxburghe Club editions with the Tripartite Chronicle, the 
last being also, with other pieces, in Wright's Political Po;ms (" Rolls Series," 
vol. i.), and the Ballades (72) in a German edition by Stengel (Marburg, 1886). 



LANGLAND AND GOWER 139 



another poem of the same kind in leonine hexameters, which is called 
the Tripartite Chronicle, and is a strongly partisan account of Richard's 
errors and downfall. This is almost wholly historical : the Vox 
diverges into a good deal of miscellaneous matter (satire on the 
friars, etc.), which reminds us of Piers Plowman. 

The Confessio Ai/iaiitis, the third and English part of Govver's 
opus inagiiiii/i, is much less vigorous and spirited than either of these 
Latin poems ; but while they have no signiticance for English litera- 
ture, it has much. It was undertaken at the hapless 

,,•■ 11 ■• 1 T.- • The Confessio 

Richards suggestion. ' It is an immense poem, or Amantis. 
collection of poems, in (with infinitesimal exceptions) 
octosyllabic couplets, accomplished to the point of extreme fluency, 
but curiously lacking in backbone and vigour. It fills, in Chalmers's 
Poets, some five hundred and fifty columns, each of which at its fullest 
holds nearly seventy lines ; but Latin arguments of the various 
sections take some room. Probably there are between thirty and 
forty thousand lines in all. The author declares his purpose of 
writing in " the middle way," of composing a book half of pleasure and 
half of learning. After a long historical and miscellaneous prologue, 
he opens his first book with one of the stock complaints of the woes of 
lovers, and proposes to make his own confession to Genius — a Rose 
personage, of course. The confessor, after a sermon, appropriately 
or inappropriately illustrated as usual, begins to hear his confession, 
and succeeds in making of it a frame for a huge series of tales from 
classical and mediasval sources alike. Actaeon, Perseus, and 
Ulysses are succeeded by the tale of Florent, the subject of Chaucer's 
Wife of BatlCs Tale ; Narcissus jostles a king of Hungary ; Alboin 
and Rosmunda have their place not far from Nebuchadnezzar. The 
beautiful story of Constance (E///ar^, see sitpra~), which Chaucer 
probably borrowed from Gower, appears ; the original of Pericles ; 
the tale of " Rosiphele," perhaps the original of T/ie Flower and the 
Teaf ; and dozens of others from all sources and of all sorts. The 
poem ends gracefully enough, though not altogether cheerfully, by 
Venus at once hearing the poet's prayer, and dismissing him from 
her court as too old for love, with a rosary of black beads hung 
round his neck inscribed Pour Reposer. 

Grace, indeed, Gower cannot be said with justice at any time to 
lack ; his faults are the want of strength, of definiteness, in his con- 
ceptions and deliveries, the insignificant fluency of his verse, and 
above all, the merciless and heart-breaking long-windedness which 
results from it. Even this conclusion, which is full of true and 
touching things (as where Venus after her operations asks the forlorn 

1 Its exact date is matter of guesswork. It proliably took a good many years 
to write, but may have been begun as early as 1383 or tliereabout. 



I40 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES wok hi 

poet laughingly what love is, and he cannot answer her), is prolonged 
to such an extent that all the shock is expended, all the race and 
spirit watered down. In his own time, by himself and by Chaucer, 
Gower was specially called " moral." Venus, with her kindly scorn, 
acknowledges this gift in him, and dismisses him to its enjoyments 
now that he is unfit for hers. In recent days a slight imputation, not 
exactly of immorality, but of morality of a low kind, has in turn been 
cast on him. The truth seems to be that he was moral enough in 
the special contemporary fashion, which consisted in illustrating 
every point by some approved extract from authority, and by sub- 
jecting it as far as possible to the process of allegorical homilising. 
Although Chaucer casts, directly or dramatically, blame on his selec- 
tion of such stories as those of Apollonius and Canace, this, if serious, 
would be rather a hypercriticism. But Gower has no passion, the 
"cold ointment" which Venus puts on his heart at the end of the 
Cotifession must, one would think , have been applied to some extent 
even before the beginning of it ; and in his most jjathetic serious 
stories (the humorous he hardly attempts) the sinewy directness of 
Chaucer, the mystical fire of Langland, are things to which he does 
not even try to attain. 

Yet it would be a very great mistake to minimise or, like many, 
to pass by as negligible the contribution of Gower to English litera- 
ture. Even in itself, if it has not the very highest qualities, it is 

far above contempt. Coleridge's rather pettish wish that 
reputalbn. Chalmers had given Lydgate instead, must have been 

caused either by very excusable ignorance of Lydgate's 
actual worth ; or by a complete failure to recognise the formal 
superiority of Gower and the importance of his priority in time ; or 
perhaps, and even probably, by that capriciousness which too often 
mars Coleridge's criticism. The contemporaries of Chaucer and 
Gower, and the immediate successors who entered into their labours, 
made no such mistake, though in the fifteenth century they some- 
times, and not quite unjustly, promoted Lydgate himself to the actual 
company of his masters. That, historically and as a master, Gower 
had a real right to be ranked with Chaucer, is as unquestionable as 
that Gower is vastly Chaucer's inferior as a poet. We need not 
attach great value to the supposed and indeed probable priority of 
Gower to Chaucer himself. It is sufficient that they were certainly 
fellow-pioneers, fellow-schoolmasters, in the task of bringing England 
to literature. Up to their time, as we have established by actual 
survey, the literary production of the country, whether in the suc- 
cessive vernaculars of Anglo-Saxon and Early Middle English, or in 
the half-naturalised foreign tongues of French and Latin, had been 
exceedingly rudimentary and limited. All but a very small part of 



CHAP. II LANGLAND AND GOWER 141 

it had been purely religious or ecclesiastical ; of the small " profane " 
jDortion the whole of the belles lettres division had been in verse ; 
and again all but a very small part of this verse had been directly 
translated romance. It was the function of great writers now to 
establish the form of English as a thoroughly equipped medium of 
literature, and to furnish it further, as far as they could, with matter 
various in kind, and with varieties of style. Even Langland, a 
much more interesting and striking figure than Gower to us, could 
have been much better spared by his own generation than Gower 
himself. In literary form Langland had nothing to teach : he was 
in fact merely rowing off-stream, if not against it, up a backwater 
which led nowhither. In substance he was powerful ratlier than 
profitable, offering nothing but allegory, of which there was already 
only too much, and political-ecclesiastical discussion, a growth always 
nearer to the tares than to the wheat of literature. In other words, 
and to vary the metaphor, he gave the workmen in the new workshop 
of English letters no new or improved tools, he opened up to them 
no new sources of material. He was a genius, he was a seer, he 
was an artist ; but he was neither master nor stock -provider in 
literature. 

Gower was both. The want of zest and race in his literary style 
(though he has style), and still more in his poetical medium, must 
not be allowed to blind us to the fact that both show an enormous 
improvement on such immediate predecessors as Hampole, as the 
author of The Pearl, as the author of Oirsor Miindi. He knows his 
craft far better than they did ; he has better tools ; he can teach 
others to turn out work that can be depended on, while they them- 
selves, and all those who followed them, were constrained either to 
have touches of genius or to be frankly inadequate if not simply in- 
tolerable. Gower, unlike Chaucer, was apparently no master of 
prose, and his faculty in verse was strictly limited to the octosyllable in 
English — in Latin, as we have said, he could write more vigorously, 
if also more barbarously. But so far as he went he was distinctly 
an example of literary accomplishment — and examples of literary 
accomplishment were what England then wanted first of all. 

What she wanted next Gower also saw, and this too he also, as 
he could, provided. It was a want which the plain common sense 
of Caxton saw still existing nearly a hundred years later, and which 
was never really supplied till a hundred more had passed ; a want 
which explains the dearth and dulness so often charged against the 
fourteenth century ; a want which no exceptional genius could supply. 
The English Muses simply did not know enough to do much : they 
wanted feeding, training, educating ; they were in their nonage. 
Now the, to us, odd and cumbrous medley, the " marine store " of 



142 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi 

the Confessio Amauits, was an attempt to supply tliese wants, to 
give matter and models at once : to write a book, as Gower sa3's in 
the interesting exordium, which only his fatal fluency prevents from 
being quite excellent — 

After the world that whilome took 
Long time in olde dales past. 
And 

to touch also 
The world that neweth every day. 

That his efforts were not vain, the genuine gratitude of his immediate 
successors for his lessons in "rhethorike" — in form — testifies; and 
Chaucer and Shakespeare are perhaps sureties after whom it is un- 
necessary to produce any others as to the value of his contributions 
in matter.^ 

1 Chaucer dedicates his Troilus to Gower and to the philosophical Strode — 
identified fairly well with Ralph Strode, who flourished about 1370, and seems to 
have written a good deal in Latin and English prose and verse. An attempt, 
ingenious but purely fanciful, has been made to find the " Fearl poet " (pp. 79- 
81) in this Strode. 



I 



CHAPTER III 

CHAUCER'S PROSE — WVCLIF, TKEVISA, MANDEVILLE 

Turning-point in prose — Chaucer's prose tales — His Boctliius — The Astrolabe — 
Wyclif — John of Trevisa — Sir John Mandeville — The first prose style 

The prose of the late fourteenth century in England is not to the 
mere literary taster, with one notable exception, at all comparable in 
interest to the verse of the same time. But it is hardly less impor- 
tant. For this time was in fact the beginning of English 
prose properly so called. Before 1350 it may be doubted "inpfofe"'"' 
whether there is a single English work in prose, with 
the exception of the Ancren Rhvle, which unites the bulk and the 
literary quality of a book proper; and while the Aitcren Riwle is 
still almost more Saxon than English in language, it belongs in subject 
to the division of sacred literature, which, though it is one of the 
noblest of all divisions, yet of necessity is less national, less idiosyn- 
cratic, than any other. 

At the great turning-point, however, which, though it must have 
come sooner or later anyhow, was undoubtedly determined to no 
small extent by the concentration of English patriotic sentiment, 
owing to the conquests of Edward III., prose did not merely, like 
verse, make a fresh start, it made a start almost for the first time. 
From the later years of Edward and the reign of Richard II. date 
four writers of prose, each noteworthy in his own way, and three out 
of the four notable in something more than his own way — Chaucer 
the poet, Wyclif the controversialist, Trevisa the chronicler, and 
the shadowy personage long known, and perhaps even yet not 
entirely exorcised, as " Sir John Mandeville." All were translators 
in less or greater degree, but all also were originals of English prose 
writing. 

The interest of Chaucer's prose works, the Treatise on the Ast?'o- 
labe, the translation of Boethius, the Par-son's Tale, and the Tale of 
Melibee is almost entirely an interest of form ; and in the last that 

143 



144 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi 

interest is minimised and almost confined to the fitful and straggling 

emergence of blank verse, or something like it, at the opening. So 

too the Parson's Ta/e, a translation and a theological 

Cliaucer's translation, does not advance us very much farther than 

prose tales. ' ., , "^ 

the prose treatises by or attributed to Hanipole and his 
followers in the first half of the century. It is good straightforward 
English, but shows no attempt at style, while the well-worn and 
strictly prescribed common form of its matter expresses further 
limitations. The Bodliius and the Astrolabe are superior. The 
version of the first, even if it were intrinsically less attractive, would 
inevitably invite comparison with Alfred's at the dawn of Saxon as 
this at the dawn of modern English prose, and the often noble, never 
contemptible, matter of the original could not and did not fail to 
stimulate an artist like Chaucer. But the most valuable point of the 

BoctJiins as an exercise for the pioneer in a new prose 
■ is the fact of the '' Metres," which, especially when 
rendered by such a poet as Chaucer into a language with such 
illimitable latent possibilities as English, must needs result in far 
more ambitious and far more successful attempts in "the other 
harmony" than had yet appeared. Accordingly some of the metre 
passages in Chaucer's version, though quite legitimate and sound 
prose, attain a rhythmical as well as verbal dignity, which English 
prose was hardly to know again save in a few passages of Malory, 
Fisher, Berners, and the translators of the Bible, till late in the 
sixteenth century. And the whole shows that, if it had suited 
Chaucer to write more originally in prose, he might have eiTected a 
revolution therein at least as great as that which he did effect in verse, 
nay greater, seeing that he had practically no forerunners. 

The attractions of the Treatise on the Astrolabe are different, but 
perhaps they are not less. The specially pleasant and easy address 
to " little Lewis my son," for whom the treatise was compiled, and of 

whom, unluckily, we know no more, does not so much 
4s',vtt/.c contrast with as supplement the interest of the piece as 

an early scientific treatise by one of the greatest of men 
of letters. The astrolabe was a small pocket instrument, somewhat 
of the sextant kind, for taking the altitudes and positions of the 
heavenly bodies ; and though the object of its use was astrological 
rather than astronomical, it has, I believe, been admitted by 
" scientists " of the severest stamp that the treatise itself shows an 
exactness of scientific acquirement up to a certain point which 
certainly would not be easy to parallel in any but a specialist of 
modern times. ^ And it is not perhaps superfluous or impertinent to 

1 Astronomy {" Asi. colit astra") was part of the regular mediceval 
Q/tadrivium. 



i 



CHAP. Ill CHAUCER'S PROSE — WYCLIF AND OTHERS 145 

add that astrology, a study which may be defined as rather extra- 
scientific than anti-scientific, and which at least attained a complete 
rigidity of scientific method, has an almost unsurpassed traditional 
interest for literature. To the time of Chaucer's great moderniser 
Dryden, it held the belief of the best-informed and least generally 
credulous of men, and even since it went out of fashion, it has been 
splendidly celebrated in prose and verse by Scott and Coleridge. 
But in this treatise of Chaucer's, the great interest is the spectacle of 
an early example of the scientific application of literature and the 
literary handling of science.^ 

The work of Wyclif,' a prose writer only, and a " sacred " and 
philosophical prose writer only, is less novel, less attractive, but not less 
important. Little, despite his fame and the violent partisanship for 
and against him, is really known of the author. We 

. Wyclif 

do not know when John Wyclif was born or where, 
though the probabilities connect his birth with the place of Wycliffe- 
on-Tees and the time of 1320-1325. He was certainly Master of 
Balliol (a northern college) at Oxford, in 1360 ; and by the confession 
of his opponents, was a recognised expert in theology and scholastic 
philosophy. He had, after giving up Balliol on his appointment to 
a college living, become Warden of Canterbury Hall, now merged in 
Christ Church ; but was deprived of this post by the next Archbishop 
but one of Canterbury. Other preferments came to him, and in 1374 
he received the Crown benefice of Lutterworth, which he held till his 
death, ten years later. The best-known event in his life was his 

1 A thing of more length than merit, the Tcslamcnt of Love, used to be included 
in Chaucer's prose works, and may be found, by those who want it, in Chalmers 
and in Professor Skeat's Supplement. For once the exorcists are justified of their 
spells. Not only does the thing (which is an allegorical-religious treatise on the 
author's quest for a " Margaret," who is less doubtfully than usual a mere eidolon of 
Grace, or spiritual truth, or the Church) contain internal evidence that it is not 
Chaucer's in its reference to him, but, as any one who, knowing the Boethius, reads 
it will see at once, it pillages that book and others of his in a way which, 
barefaced in another, would be unintelligible in himself. It is now put down (a 
kind of signature being discovered) to a certain Thomas Usk, a busy Londoner, 
who was executed with a good deal of barbarity by the triumphant Gloucester 
faction in 1388. Usk did not quite deserve " hanging for his bad prose "; but 
it is not good. 

" Wyclil's English work, outside the Bible, with some not his, is to be found 
in Mr. T. Arnold's Select English Works of Wyclif {-^ vols.). Clarendon Press, and 
Mr. F. D. Matthew's English Works of Wyclif hitherto uiifrinted (E.E.T.S.). The 
whole Bible, a composite work of Wyclif and others, was edited in 4 vols. 4to 
by Forshall and Madden, Oxford, 1850; the Gospels (very conveniently printed 
in parallel columns, with the early Gothic and A.S. versions and Tyndale's) by 
Bosworth and Waring (3rd ed. London, 1888). His very voluminous I^atin 
works, philosophical and ecclesiastical, have been tackled by a special Wyclif 
Society. 



146 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book 111 

summons to appear in St. Paul's on a charge of heresy in 1377, on 
wliich occasion the court was practically broken up by the turbulence 
of Wyclif's partisan, John of Gaunt. Into the nature and extent of 
his heresies we are here precluded from entering. On '• Dominion," 
on Transubstantiation, and other points, they reached the extreme of 
scholastic subtlety ; and perhaps the most practical part of his tenets 
was the establishment of an irregular order of "poor priests," who 
took the field at once against the corrupt friars and the extravagantly 
endowed prelates of the time. These poor priests, more definitely 
than Wyclif himself, were responsible for the " Lollardy " which, 
though its first-fruits in the Wat T3ler insurrection came in VVyclifs 
lifetime, developed later, and did not call for sharp repression till the 
reigns of Henry IV. and Henry V. Much of Wyclifs tendency in 
politics ecclesiastical is observed in Langland, but the latter shows no 
sign of any doctrinal heresy. 

The English literary work of Wyclif and the Wyclifites (for a 
large part of the University of Oxford was saturated with his doctrine, 
and tlie complete body of Wyclifian literature is rather an earlier 
'' Tracts for the Times " than the work of any one man) consists on 
the one hand of a new and complete translation of the Bible, on the 
other of a considerable mass of tracts and sermons intended for 
popular consumption. In some respects these latter are not very 
delightful or profitable reading. We find already in them the hard, 
narrow intolerance of contrary opinion and the refusal to believe in 
its honesty, the savage, churlish hatred of all the beauty of holiness — 
music (the '' knacking of new songs," as the Wyclifite catchword 
has it), painted windows, fair architecture, and all that makes the 
mediaeval church gracious and precious in our eyes — the almost 
Iscariot-like grudging of all expense on divine w^orship that is not 
'' given to the poor," the rage, at least as much political and social as 
theological, at wealthy and exalted bishops and abbots, the sectarian 
jealousy between "poor priests" and friars, — all the ugly Philistine 
sourness, in short, which disgraces the extreme Protestant party of 
the sixteenth century and the extreme Puritan party of the seventeenth. 
There is little room in this furious cudgel-play of partisan hatred for 
the serene exercise in elaborate prose which Chaucer gives us in the 
Boet/iius, for the scientific precision of tlie Astrolabe, for the gay and 
varied garrulity of Mandeville. A few lively touches of manners, a 
few of the less merely '-teeth-gnashing" flouts of satire, a quaint 
phrase here and there, a racy translation of antiquity — these are the 
principal attractions w^hich the Wyclifite tracts have to offer; while 
as for the Translation of the Bible, as it cannot compete as literature 
with that produced some two centuries later, so it has merely the 
same attraction as matter. It should be observed that there are 



CHAP. Ill CHAUCER'S PROSE— WYCLIF AND OTHERS 147 

later and earlier versions of it, the former much the more advanced 
in grammar and style. 

Nevertheless both, as much the one as the other, were most 
important as contributions to English prose. Wyclif and his coad- 
jutors brought to both their tasks — that of translation and that of 
tract-writing — a combination of education and of "object" which 
has been very rare in literary history. They were all trained in the 
severest science of scholastic study, the most thorough perhaps that 
has ever been seen. Even a Bachelorship of Divinity represented 
four years training in arts, three more in the quadrivium of mediaeval 
science, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy ; and seven more 
still in theology. Every man who had gone through this had been 
in the habit of constant disputes with opponents, on the watch to 
note the slightest vagueness of definition, the slightest illicit process 
of argument. Yet these accomplislied scholars were in their new 
venture addressing the common people first of all. Their training 
compelled them to be precise ; their object compelled them to be 
forcible. In the translation of the Bible they had a wide range of 
the most various kinds of literature, history, poetry, oratory, 
philosophy, parable, — matter which still retained, after being passed 
through the Latin sieve, large admixture of its original Oriental 
elements to colour and diversify the English result. In their tracts 
they had above all things to be exact in aim to meet their enemies, 
and to be forcible to attract disciples. No better exercising ground 
for an infant prose, in at least some ways, could have been provided, 
than this combined one of translation and polemic. We do not, 
indeed, find in Wyclif, or in any of the immediate Wyclifites, the full 
consequences, which we shall find fifty years later in Pecock's 
Repressor, of a vocabulary and arrangement varying between extreme 
scholasticism and extreme vernacularity, but we find approaches in 
both directions. 

The third prose author of this time owes his position to reasons 
rather different from those which have preferred Chaucer, Wyclif, 
and Mandeville. He is neither a great poet who was an almost 
equally great all-round man of letters, nor an eager con- 
troversialist who has linked his name with one of the Trevisa^ 
great versions of the Bible (there seems to have been 
an idea in Caxton's mind that Trevisa did translate the Bible, but 
nothing else is known of it) nor an interesting if shadowy personality 
whose name is attached to a charming piece of literature. He 
simply produced an English version of the Latin Chronicle or Poly- 
chronicon of Ralph Higden, which had been written not so very 
much before his own day. Higden was a West countryman, who 
was born about the last decade but one of the thirteenth century ; 



148 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMrORARIES 



became a monk of tlie Benedictine Abbey of St. Werburgh at 
Ciiester; perliaps (it is necessaiy to lay stress on that "perhaps") 
had something to do witli Enghsli literature directly in the matter 
of the Chester Plays, and certainly wrote this Polychronicon, one 
of the usual historical surveys, " beginning at the beginning," narrow- 
ing to a rather more particular survey of Jewish and Roman his- 
tory with others, and ending with that of England continued to 
the writer's own time. Higden is said, on the not altogether trust- 
worthy authority of Bale, to have died in 1363. Not very long 
after this his book was Englished 1 by John of Trevisa, who, as the 
" Tre " shows, was a Cornishman, but seems to have been chiefly 
connected with Berkeley in Gloucestershire. He is said to have died 
in 1413, but his History was finished as long before as 1387. The 
piece has more interest for its matter, which includes much early 
(indeed the earliest) description of England in English, and for the evi- 
dence it gives of the now unrestrainable impulse to write about English 
matters generally in the English tongue, than for any special literary 
merit or savour. Trevisa, who seems to have been no great scholar 
in Latin, for he confesses that he could not always understand his 
original, was no genius in English. But his style is racy from its 
age, and agreeable for its want of pretension. In his day a man 
deserved almost more credit for undertaking a long work in English 
than most men would deserve now for abstaining from it. 

The last name to be mentioned in this chapter is by far the most 
interesting in the special connection of English prose. But the dis- 
cussion of it is complicated, and obstructed by a more than ordinary 
amount of those teasing and extra-literary squabbles about authorship 
and authors which meet us so frequently. Nay, in consequence of 
the doubts which have been raised as to the existence of Sir John 
Mandeville, and the proofs (not invalid as such things go) that the 
real author was a French or Flemish physician of Liege, proposals 
have even been made to oust the book- altogether from English 
literary history and give it to French. 

These proposals cannot for one moment be admitted. The 
French version of Mandeville may be — very likely is — the oldest. It 

1 Edited, witli the Latin, in the "Rolls Series." As with nearly all the early 
historians, the interest of the work for literature can be almost sufficiently gauged 
by sample, and a dozen pages of extract will be found in Morris and Skeat, 
Partn. 

■- There is no thoroughly satisfactory edition. Wright's, in the Bohn Library 
(among Early 'J'razr/s in Palestine), is too much modernised; Mr. Warner's, for 
the Roxburghe Club, is not generally accessible; Halliwell's, more than once 
reprinted, is the best edition; and Mr. E. B. Nicholson, Bodley's Librarian, is 
the best authority on the disputed points, which he has treated in the Encylopcsdia 
Britannica and elsewhere. 



CHAi'. Ill CHAUCER'S PROSE — WYCLIF AND OTHERS 149 

may have been — it very likely though by no means necessarily was — 
written by some one who was not an Englishman. But it is a book 
which, in the history of literature, has very little impor- 
tance. French prose had been written currently on all sub- iMandeviile 
jects for two centuries before it ; and there was nothing 
remarkable in its existence. No one has contended that the French 
author can for a moment vie with Villehardouin, or Joinville, or his 
own contemporary Froissart, as a prose writer. The book has had 
no influence on French literary history — no great French writer has 
been inspired by it, none of its " notes " in the least corresponds to 
any mark of French. The contrary of all these things is the case 
in regard to the English version. Even the infidels do not place 
that version much later than 1400, and it may be permitted to doubt 
whether it is not older ; for though the prose shows an advance in ease 
and resource on Wyclif, a great one on Trevisa, it is not much, if at 
all, in front of Chaucer. It is quite an admirable thing in itself; it 
shows, if it be a translation, that some third person must be added 
to Malory and Berners to make a trinity of such English translators, 
as the world has rarely seen, in the fifteenth century. It expresses 
with remarkable fidelity the travelling mania of the English, and in 
the stories of the " Watching of the Falcon," the •' Daughter of 
Hippocrates," and others, it has supplied romantic inspiration for 
generation after generation. As French it is little or nothing to 
Frenchmen or to France ; as English it is a great thing to England 
and to Englishmen. 

The facts as to authorship and contents are as follows. The 
book purports to have been written by Sir John Mandeville of St. 
Albans, who began to travel on Michaelmas Day 1322, journeyed in 
the East for thirty years and more, and after obtaining leave from the 
Pope, and coming home a sufferer from gout, produced his book in 
Latin and French and English in 1356. Later accounts have it that 
he was buried at Liege. Against this are the facts that no other notice 
of any such Sir John Mandeville exists; that the arms quoted as 
on the Liege monument have nothing to do with any family of the 
name ; and that, as we have mentioned, the French version seems to 
be much anterior to the English, if not also to the Latin. Further, 
before any more serious doubts had been started about Mandeville's 
personality than those which arose from the marvels narrated in his 
book, and which had almost from the first caused it to be regarded 
as a capital example of a "traveller's tale," — it had been observed that 
its contents were very far from original. A certain Friar Odoric may 
have travelled in <• Cathay" (Chinese Tartary), and had his travels 
written down by a brother of his Order, as early as 1330. Now the 
resemblance between Mandeville and Odoric is striking. Further 



150 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEM TOR ARIES book hi 

borrowings, certain or extremely probable, have been indicated from 
another Franciscan friar, from an Armenian named Hayton, from a 
German knight named Boldensele, and from others. Part, it is true, 
is not accounted for, and seems to be direct personal experience ; but 
the whole is very like a blend of such experience with matter from 
earlier books. And the compiler has been identified with a certain 
Lieo^e physician, John of Burgundy or John of the Beard, who is said 
to have revealed his personality on his deathbed to a third John, 
John of Outremeuse. Perhaps we may not impertinently, like Prince 
Henry, take leave of all these withered old Johns and Sir Johns, 
whose identity is shadowy in the extreme and of no importance. 

Once more the book is the thing; and the importance of the 
book, by whomsoever written, at whatsoever time anterior to the 
latest (the beginning of the fifteenth century) at which it can possibly 
have appeared, and whether translation or original, remains for the 
history of English prose immutable and inexpugnable. The title of 
" Father of English prose,'' which used to be given to Mandeville, is 
indeed rather silly, as are all such titles, if only in that they provoke 
the chronological and other squabbles from which literary study has 
suffered so much. No one man could be *' the Father of English 
Prose " at any time ; and as a matter of fact it had, as we have seen, 
at this time at least four simultaneous fathers. What the Voyage and 
Travaile really is, is this — it is, so far as we know, and even beyond 
our knowledge in all probability and likelihood, the first considerable 
example of prose in English dealing neither with the beaten track of 
theology and philosophy, nor with the, even in the Middle Ages, 
restricted field of history and home topography, but expatiating freely 
on unguarded plains and on untrodden hills, sometimes dropping into 
actual prose romance, and always treating its subject as the poets 
had treated theirs in Brut and Mort d' Arthur, in Troy-book and 
Alexandreid, as a mere canvas on which to embroider flowers of 
fancy. It is the first book of belles let t res in English prose, and this 
is such a priority as the most ambitious of authors, identified or 
unknown, might be content with. And being such, it deserves a 
brief handling of its material and formal characteristics, such as we 
have given to its verse predecessors in the same supreme, and indeed 
only purely literary, department of literature. 

The extreme attractiveness of the matter, and the delightful 
illustrations of old attached to it, have perhaps a little drawn away 
attention from the fact that the form of the book is well worthy of 
the substance. A summary of the life of our Lord (for it must be 
remembered that the book is primarily a road-book for the Holy 
Land) leads to a description of Constantinople and a precis of the 
tenets of the Greek Church. Then we cross the " Brace of St. 



CHAP. Ill CHAUCER'S PROSE — WYCLIF AND OTHERS 151 

George " (Sea of Marmora) and come to Asia Minor, where Cos gives 
us the " Daughter of Hippocrates," and Rhodes another wild tale, 
and Cyprus an account of hunting leopards. Jerusalem itself follows, 
and " Babylon " (which it must be remembered is always Cairo in 
the Middle Ages), and a long account of Egypt and of Arabia, and 
how roses came into the world, and of Jerusalem again, and of whole 
Palestina. Only after this do we get into the true Utopian El Dorado 
of Mandeville, with the " Watching of the Spar-hawk " in an 
Armenian castle (what time the Ark still was visible on the top of 
Ararat), and the customs of Ind, and the great Cham of Cathay, and 
the royal State of Prester John, and the four floods that come from 
the Paradys Terrestre. There is hardly a page in the book which is 
not full of interesting detail, of romantic suggestion, of fact sublimed 
and opalised by imagination, or by the mere process of continuous 
report from lip to lip and book to book. 

But the great interest for us is that here, and here for the first 
time distinctly, the subject and the idiosyncrasy of the author pro- 
duce between them a style. There are approaches to a style in 
Chaucer ; but he was kept too close to his text in Boethius, to his 
subject in the Astrolabe. Wyclif might have reached one ; Trevisa 
probably could not : Mandeville did. His object being to produce 
his effect by the accumulation of interesting marvels, with few models 
before him except the arrangements of the Bible, he mostly affects 
short sentences, and has a trick of beginning each with " And." 
This conjunction is dear to the story-teller, because it has a sort of 
arresting and exciting effect upon the hearer, by promise of something 
fresh ; while the long periodic sentence, besides requiring 
greater practice, is apt to weary hearers as opposed to ^^^^^ J^l^ 
readers. The vocabulary is simple and rather modern, 
with few obsolete oniarchiac words, as indeed might be expected, 
whether the book was really the work of a cosmopolitan traveller or 
that of a mere homekeeping forger of letters. Few books of the 
time, when the spelling is completely modernised, have so little 
uncouthness about them. And one thing (rarely to be said of any 
author, rarest of one mediaeval in time) is that this author knows 
exactly when he has said enough. Nothing tempts him to the fatal 
loquacity of nearly all writers between the Dark Ages and the 
Renaissance, and he will even apologise for the Sparrowhawk discus- 
sion which tells the reason of the woes of Armenia. " This is not 
the right way to go to the parts that I have named, but for to see the 
marvel." To see the marvel of the rising of literary prose style in 
English there is no better way than to read Mandeville. 



INTERCHAPTER III 

Short as is the period wliich has been covered in the preceding 
Book, and few as are the names which it contains, we have at last 
reached in it one, the importance of which has, in great jDart at least, 
not to be pleaded for. At no time during the present century — at 
no time, indeed, during the last five centuries, except, and that not 
universally, for a short interval during the eighteenth — would the 
right of Chaucer to a place, and a great one, in English literary 
history have been contested ; while, silly as the title of " Father 
of English Prose " may be, the fact of its having been long ago 
awarded sometimes to Mandeville, sometimes to Wyclif, is a piece 
of evidence in itself. Yet there is no need for this to break the good 
custom of these interposed summaries ; indeed, one at the present 
juncture may have special value. 

For it is impossible to appreciate too clearly the exact position 
of Ciiaucer in poetry, while that of himself and his contemporaries 
in prose certainly has not always been a23preciated with even the 
least clearness — if Professor Earle had any justification for saying, 
not more than a few years ago, that "there exists a general impres- 
sion among educated Englishmen that our prose dates from the 
sixteenth century." ^ 

Even to appreciate Chaucer with exactness and propriety is by 
no means a matter of course ; yet without such an appreciation it 
is impossible to get the parts of the history into true proportion and 
connection. At no time have competent readers failed to perceive 
his abounding humour, the shaping faculty which enables him to 
make every character at once an individual and a type, the "gold 
dewdrops of his speech," the sweetness of his music. Perhaps we 
have outgrown (there is at any rate no excuse for us if we have not) 
the idea entertained even by Dryden that this sweetness is "rude," 
that there is something untutored and infantine about it. But it may 
be doubted whether even yet, wliether even among persons who may 

J English Proir, ]i. 369. 
152 



INTERCHAPTER III 



153 



boast some acquaintance with him, an accurate estimate of his posi- 
tion in regard both to the past and the immediate future prevails. 
It so happens, oddly enough, that the first part of this has been 
expressed with extreme propriety of fact, and in words that could 
not be bettered in another language in reference to another person, 
by a writer who probably had never heard of Chaucer, and would 
have regarded him as a savage if he had. Boileau's famous couplet — 

Villon sut le premier dans ces siecles grossiers 
Debrouiller I'art confus de nos vieux romanciers — 

is, as it stands, a sort of HeloJ among critical utterances. The sihcles 
were not grossiers ; Villon 'was not the first to " disembroil " poetical 
art of any kind ; and what he did had nothing whatever to do with 
the vieux romanciers, but was the infusion of a modern spirit into 
forms already arranged for him as exactly and neatly as any art 
could be arranged. But the second line expresses precisely what 
Chaucer did in English, and what gives him, if not his chief title to 
admiration as a poet, his chief place in literary history. He, in fact 
and in deed — 

Debrouilla I'art confus de nos vieux romanciers. 

It already existed in plentiful quantity, and now and then in no incon- 
siderable degrees of accomplishment. But it was all in the shape 
of brouillon — of rough draft. Men had practised the octosyllabic 
couplet for centuries, but they had never succeeded in writing it 
with a sure mastery at once of vigour and of variety, of smoothness 
and of strength. They had got safely through very intricate stanzas, 
but no one of them had any stanza so under his command as to 
write anything at all approaching the best passages — indeed prac- 
tically the whole — of Troiliis. They had now and then stumbled upon 
the great heroic couplet itself, but they had hardly known it when 
they saw it, and had invariably let it slip again, even if they per- 
ceived its character. Nay, in his own day, some men were even 
relapsing from the point that art had reached on the earlier stage of 
"rim ram ruf" — on^the rhythmical prose of alliteration either simple 
of itself or awkwardly bedizened, like a true savage art, with feathers 
and gawds of inappropriate stanza and rhyme. 

All this Chaucer debrouilla — set straight, copied out fair, and 
left the copy so transposed as a testimony for ever, and a point to 
which men might return, but which, once gained, they never could 
really lose. He was no doubt powerfully backed on the more artistic 
side by Gower, but Gower had, in English at least, little strength ; 
and he was far more powerfully backed on the other by Langland, 
but Langland had, or chose to have in this respect^ an inferior and 



154 . CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book 

antiquated art. In the union of the two Chaucer stood alone, and 
fortunately he was quite able to stand alone. 

To such an estimate the demur may be made, '• If he did so 
much, how was it that outside his own work so little resulted — that 
nearly a century and a half had to pass after his death before any real 
advance was made ? " To this, of course, no absolutely complete answer 
can be given. The most philosophical view of the philosophy of history 
never pretends to e-xj^lain all the facts, especially in regard to " the 
times and the seasons." The best explanation why there is no poet 
in English — even in Scots — who is the equal of Chaucer, between 
Chaucer himself and Surrey, is that, as a matter of fact, no such poet 
appeared. But we can give some side-explanations, some, as it were, 
marginal notes on this, and we can at any rate see that things were 
much better as they were. If Chaucer had not appeared when he 
did, the language might have got into ways too slovenly for it to 
acquire a real Ars poctica at all, might have succumbed to the rigid 
syllabic prosody of French (there was some danger of this for a long 
time to come), or have gone off "rim-ram-rufifing " into the wilder- 
ness. But since he appeared when he did, his work was necessarily 
exposed to the drawback that it was composed in a language which 
had still not acquired its complete modern form. The final e, a. 
troublesome and by this time a useless thing, which meant anything 
and everything and nothing, had to be shed ; some other structural 
changes had to be gone through. Above all, the language had to 
pass under certain modifications of sound which have never yet been 
fully explained. In this welter Chaucer could not be equalled; 
Spenser could not come till it was over. But through it all Chaucer's 
work remained, above the welter itself, a pattern and a beacon at 
once. 

The influence of Gower, infinitely less as is his value for us, was 
probably not so very much less than Chaucer's for his own contem- 
poraries. The third great poetical figure of the time exactly reverses 
these conditions. Langland is for us a true, nay a great, poet ; his 
reactionary aberrations in form can do us no harm, and his apoca- 
lyptic obscurity adds something of a zest to our reading of him. 
These would not have been the best of influences on his own age, 
which was urgently in need of formal correction, and was not at all 
in need of incitements to allegorical meandering. But, as a matter 
of fact, he does not seem to have exercised much, if he exercised any, 
influence, and what lie had was in the direction of political and other 
satire, not that of poetry proper. Even the alliterators did not usually 
follow his straightforward reliance on alliteration and accent, but 
confessed their sense of insufficiency by calling in more and more 
the aid of stanza and of rhyme. 



INTERCHAPTER III 155 



The formal importance of the age in prose is hardly less, though 
its productions have far less intrinsic interest. The excursion of 
prose beyond the narrow limits of theological matter which had so 
long confined it was one great thing ; the use of it to address the 
common people, who had hitherto been only accessible by verse, was 
another. That the third limit — translation — which had been im- 
posed upon it still remained, was no drawback for the time. Very 
much more importation of vocabulary ; very much more experiment, like 
that of Pecock in the next age, with term-forging ; very much more 
copying of the more accomplished prose forms of French and Latin, 
were necessary before tlie resources of style could really be at the 
command of the English prose writer in miscellaneous subjects. But 
the return to vernacular writing in history, more than two hundred 
years after the pen had left the hand of the last annalist of Peter- 
borough, meant a very great deal ; the application of the genius for 
letters of such a man as Chaucer to scientific exposition in the 
Astrolabe, to philosophical exposition in the Boet/a'ns, ineant a great 
deal more ; perhaps the example of prose narrative of the easy, 
interesting, not first of all instructive kind in Mandeville meant 
most of all. This fascinating shadow, whatever else he was, and 
whatever else he did, was the spiritual father of Malory and Berners, 
of Lyly and Sidney, of Defoe and Fielding, of Miss Austen and 
Scott. They were still long to be '"bodiless childfuls," but they 
were now "bodiless childfuls of life,"' and Sir John, if ever any other, 
gave them that life. 

Lastly, we must not forget, though considerations of weight have 
necessitated a mere allusion to it as yet, that the third great kind, 
the kind which is not essentially prose nor essentially verse, but 
partakes of both — to wit. Drama — was by this time certainly born in 
English. It was as yet in swaddling clothes ; perhaps we must not 
be too absolutely certain that any single piece now actually in our 
possession existed in the form in which we have it now.^ But there 
is no reason for doubt that this momentous and important kind — which 
was to absorb the greatest genius of the first really complete age of 
English literature, which was to confer inestimable benefits upon 
both prose and verse, and was to be the first literary kind to engage, 
apart from some consideration of profit, the attention of a great 
audience — had for some time left the use of Latin and become 
common in the vernacular. It was still, as has been said, in 
swaddling clothes, it was performed and composed in ways unfavour- 
able to a rapid, accomplished literary development, it was limited in 
subject, awkward in form; but it was the drama — the direct ancestor 

1 The well-known Harro-iving of Hell is possibly as early as Alison, but it is 
faintly dramatic, and there is a long interval between it and other things. 



156 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMrORARIES book iii 

of the great Elizabethan drama itself — and its presence in the list of 
literary kinds is a matter of the first importance. 

In short, the literary work of the Middle Ages proper in England 
was now complete, and, with a good fortune rare and almost un- 
paralleled, what they had given was caught up, summed, uttered in 
perfect form by a poet of the greatest genius, and a prose writer of 
no small talent. Perhaps this good fortune had in a manner to be 
paid for by the relapse in poetry which the next century saw. But 
even this was a rest as well as a relapse, and meanwhile prose the 
unresting, if also the unhasting, was making advances as steady as 
they are unmistakable. 



BOOK IV 

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 
CHAPTER I 

THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS — LYDGATE TO SKELTON 

Contempt for fifteenth century literature — Lydgate — Occleve — Bokenam — 
Audelay and Minors — Hawes — The Pastime of Pleasure — The Example of 
Virtue — Barclay — The Ship of pools — The Eclogues — Skelton — His life — 
His poems 

Few sections of English Letters have been more abused or more 
disdained than the Hterature, and especially the purely English 
poetry, of the fifteenth century. The contemptuous ignorance of 
M. Taine extended even to the Scottish poets, who have „ , 

^ ' . Contempt lor 

been more generally excepted from condemnation ; and fifteenth cent- 
less excusable under-valuation of these same has been ""^^ nerature. 
made by critics, at least to the language born, such as Mr. Lowell and 
Mr. Lounsbury. Even those who do not commit the unpardonable 
or inexplicable error of belittling or ignoring Dunbar and Henryson 
have usually a short shrift and a long drop for the English writers of 
the time, and especially for the English poets. 

Of these disdains literary history knows nothing; and nothing 
is to be passed over by her unless it is at once devoid of intrinsic 
attraction, and of no importance as supplying connections and 
origins. Even from the first jooint of view, slighting of the Twa 
Maryit Weineii and the IVedo, of the Testatnent of Cressid, of the 
King's Quair, of Malory and Berners, of the Niit-browtte Maid, and 
the carol " I sing of a maiden," must convict the slighter either of 
invincible bad taste, or of ignorance that cannot be too soon 
corrected. From the second, the period which shows us the progress 
m, and the final stoppage of, the blind alley of alliteration, the strange 

157 



158 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

failure to make the improvement that might have been expected on 
tlie magnificent advantages given by Chaucer, the process, slow but 
sure, of elaborating the machinery and amassing the capital of 
English prose, the probable beginning of the ballad, the spread and 
popularising of the drama,^ and the certain and glorious ending of 
romance, need not be ashamed of itself in any company which knows 
and observes the laws of literary history. 

The poets, both Scotch and English, of this century were wont to 
leash with Chaucer and Govver in the triplet of masters whom they 
acknowledged and hailed with reverence John Lydgate the "Monk 
of Bury." Very little is known of the life of this voluminous, some- 
what undistinguished, but by no means unpleasant or uninteresting 
writer, who has had decidedly hard measure in the way of 
presentation to modern readers, though the Early English Text 
Society has begun to devote a portion of its too small resources and 
its too largely drawn upon labour to the task.^ The latest certain 
date in his life is 1446. As the dates of his orders are — sub-deacon, 
1389; deacon, 1393; and priest, 1397, he may have been born about 
1370. He appears to have enjoyed the advantages of the three 
greatest European Universities of his day — Oxford, Paris, and 
Padua — and his knowledge both of ancient and modern literature 
must have been pretty complete for the time. He taught rhetoric at 
Bury St. Edmunds, and it must be remembered that Rhetoric, which 
had for many centuries, legitimately or illegitimately, extended itself 
in the sense of the Art of Prose Literature, had by this time absorbed 
poetics likewise, and that in the fifteenth century especially 
''rhetorike" and (in French) rJictoriqueur are words almost inter- 
changeable with " poetry " and " poet." Unluckily, as from the days of 
Martianus Capella^ downwards rhetoric and ornate diction had been 
closely connected, this also became confounded with poetry, and the 
main objection to fifteenth-century verse next to, or indeed connected 

1 For reasons given /('^Z it has seemed better to reserve the dramatic matter, 
which might have made some appearance even earlier, and has a fair claim to a 
place here, for the next Book, so far as the main te.xt is concerned. See also 
Interchapters iii. {supra) and iv. (i?i/ra). 

2 Until this reissue, which has already given the Temple of Glass and other 
things, was begun, Hallivvell's edition of the Minor Poems for the Percy Society, 
and the Story of Thebes, and some smaller pieces given by Chalmers in his 
Chauceriana, formed the accessible Lydgate, illustrated by four and twenty 
pages of biljliography, which Ritson devotes in his Dibliographia Poetica 
(London, 1802) to "this voluminous, prosaick, and drivelling monk," as the critic, 
with his usual sweetness, describes his subject. 

3 This crabbed, but to fit tastes not unpleasing, writer paints the breast of 
Rhetoric as exquisifisslmis gevimarum color Hits balteatiim, gives her arms 
which clash vebit fnlgoreae nubis fragore colliso bombis dissiiltantibus, and 
assigns to her a vox aiirata — all transparent allegory. 



THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 159 



with, its prolixity and dulness, is its addiction to " aureate " terms — ' 
that is to say, bombastic classical or pseudo-classical phraseology. *"- 

In this Lydgate is not quite such a sinner as some of his con- 
temporaries and still more his successors. He could now and then 
catch something at least of the propriety of language which is one of 
his master Chaucer's glories, and he was also less to seek than any 
other of that master's purely English followers in versification, though 
he too shows some signs of that curious confusion of poetic tongue 
which came upon his time. 

The early printers, Caxton, Pynson, and Wynkyn de Worde, in 
whose time Lydgate still ranked as one of the di 7najores of English 
literature, were not unkind to him ; but the mania for early printed 
books as such has made these editions entirely inac- 
cessible, save in public libraries, to the lover of litera- '^ 
ture who is not a millionaire. Fortunately, the pieces noted above 
appear to be very fair specimens of his work, much of the current 
abuse of which is only an echo of the violence of Ritson, a critic 
seldom to be undervalued when he praises, but too often merely to 
be neglected when he blames. The Thebes poem, which was 
obviously intended as a pendant to the KnigJifs Tale, gives the 
more canonical histor}' of the wars which are taken for granted as j^re- 
cedent in Chaucer's poem, consists of between four and five thousand 
verses in couplets {vide infra'), and begins as a Canterbury Tale with 
a prologue, references to Ospringe and other localities, and an invitation 
by the host to "Dan John" to tell it. In this piece the characters 
of Statins and those of Boccaccio are both drawn upon, and the 
story is sufficiently well told, though with too many speeches and 
involutions, and with little share of Chaucer's orderly and artful 
action. The most noteworthy thing about it, however, as about most 
of the poetry of Lydgate, of Occleve, and even of Hawes, not to 
mention smaller men, is that strange loss of " grip " in versification 
which has been more than once referred to. How far this is due to 
careless or ignorant copying or printing cannot be said with con- 
fidence until a much larger amount of Lydgate's enormous work has 
been competently edited from the MSS. ; but it is very improbable 
that this can ever be made to bear the whole blame or any large part 
of it.i The truth would rather seem to be that Chaucer was too 

1 If Lydgate is really responsible for the following lines in an account of 
Henry VI. 's entry into London {Minor Poems, p. 3), no bathos and no bad verse 
can have been inaccessible to him — 

Their clothing was of colour full convenable: 
The iioUe J\fayo7- dad in red veleivet ( !) 
The Sherifis, the Aldermen, full notable, 
In furred clokys the colour Scarlett. 
Observe that " In furred clokys, scarlet in colour," is an obvious change, and 
makes a very fair line. 



i6o THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

far in advance of his time both in ear and in perception of the 
capabilities of the language ; that his followers, while ignorant of the 
real powers of the decasyllable, improperly attributed to it that license 
of shortening as well as lengthening by equivalence which, as we have 
seen, had generally prevailed in regard to the octosyllable ; or else 
that they were bewildered by the old go-as-you-please liberty of 
alliterative rhythm, while the confusion was worse confounded by 
rapid and uncertain changes of pronunciation and accentuation in 
the language, as English linally shook off all dependence upon 
French, as its dialects mixed and blended, and as other influences 
were brought to bear. Certain it is that in Lydgate, still more in 
Occleve, and more or less in all the others of this chapter, while the 
line sometimes loses all rhythmical sufficiency, though it does yield 
ten syllables to the finger, it at any other time fails to respond even 
to this mechanical test, and simply sprawls — a frank and confessed 
nondescript or failure. 

These faults appear, but somewhat less, in the Complaint of the 
Black Knight and the other smaller poems caught in the great 
"Chauceriana" net. The rhyme-royal of the Complaint seems to 
have acted as a sort of support and stay to the backboneless writers 
of this time. In the other shorter poems, and in the pleasant piece 
of London Lichpcttny — which is one of Lydgate's best and best-known 
things, and which describes the woes of a penniless (or one-pennied) 
man in Westminster Hall and in London shops and streets — there is 
naturally much more variety and liveliness than in the longer and 
more conventional efforts. Not that there is a lack of convention 
even here. It is exceedingly rash to take the confessions of youthful 
follies and peccadilloes which Lydgate makes in his Testament, just 
as Occleve does in his Male Regie, and many other poets of this and 
other ages elsewhere, for solid biographical documents. The chief 
of Lydgate's other works are the Temple of Glass, the very title of 
which is redolent of fifteenth-century allegory ; the Falls of Princes, 
perhaps his most popular book in his own day, adapted from 
Boccaccio, and itself serving as model to the famous miscellany of 
the Mirror for Magistrates in the sixteenth century ; a Troy Book, 
one of the numerous versions of Guido Colonna's plagiarism from 
Benoit de Sainte-More ; Proverbs ; the Court of Sapience ; a Life of 
Our Lady ; a Chronicle of English Kings ; Lives of his patron at Bury 
St. Edmunds ; and so forth. These are but a few of the enormous 
number of works attributed to him. But the general value of 
Lydgate is not hard to fix. He is a scholar, not a master, a versifier 
rather than a poet ; an interesting figure in a time of groping and 
transition, and perhaps not so very unlike other figures in other 
times. 



CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS i6i 

Thomas Occleve ^ (there seems to be as good authority for this 
as for the somewliat uglier form '' Hoccleve ") is, and probably will 
continue to be, inseparably connected in literary history 
with Lydgate, of whom he is a rather less voluminous 
and rather less accomplished double. He was often given to auto- 
biographic details of the preciser kind, and from two of these we 
gather that he must have been born about 1 368 {^ivhere is guesswork, 
the nearest locality in spelhng being Hockclitfe in Bedfordshire). 
He entered the Privy Seal Office when he was about twenty, 
and we have abundant records of payments to him for parchment, 
ink, and wax used, as well as of salaries and pensions. He was 
always expecting a benefice or " corrody " (annuity charged on 
ecclesiastical revenues) ; but nothing came till 1424, when he was 
quartered, to an extent not exactly defined, on the Priory of Southwick 
in Hampshire. We may have sometliing of his as late as 1448, and 
he may have died a little later, say 1450. 

Occleve's principal work is an English version or adaptation in 
rhyme-royal of one or more Latin originals, under the title of De 
Regiinine Principiuii^- preceded by a long introduction, partly auto- 
biographic and wholly moralising. The enthusiastic address to his 
" master dear " Chaucer, of whom, be it remembered, one of his 
MSS. preserves the most probably authentic portrait, is the most 
interesting thing in this lugubrious and desultory work, of which the 
versification frequently sprawls and staggers in a fashion beside 
which even Lydgate's is well girt and neatly moving. 

Among the smaller pieces attention has chiefly been given to the 
above referred to piece, entitled La Male Regie de T. Occleve, which 
seems to have been written when the poet was coming to forty years, 
after which age of wisdom, however, he married — for love, he says. 
This poem has the invariable characteristics of such regrets for lost 
youth, together with the less usual peculiarity that the poet represents 
himself as not merely a ne'er-do-well, but a very poor creature — a 
valetudinarian, '• letting I dare not wait upon would " in his very 
escapades, a coward, a glutton, vain, weak, lazy, but with none of the 
nobler vices. If the thing had been better done we might have 
taken it for his humour ; but the poorness of the verse, -^ with a 
Chaucerian flash or two such as — 

Excess-at-board has laid his knife with me. 



1 The first volume of an edition of him has been issued by the E.E.T.S. 
under Dr. Furnivall's editorship. 

2 Edited for the Roxburghe Club by Wright in i860. 

3 Occleve, says Dr. Furnivall, " is content so long as he can count the syllables 
on his fingers." This is generous rather than severe. 

M 



THE FIFl^EENTH CENTURY 



is rather a warrant for truth. A singularly weak Complaint of Our 
Lady before the Cross, where the subject strikes no spark out of 
Occleve's flabby nature ; a feebly violent onslaught on Sir John Old- 
castle and the Lollards ; certain ballades, pious or political, which are 
no ballades at all, Occleve being apparently too weak to keep up to the 
rhyme-and-refrain scheme, may be noticed. The Letter of Cupid to 
Lovers is a little better. Not so much can be said of Occleve'' s Com- 
plaint and Occleve''s Dialogue, though the latter may have an attrac- 
tion for some in its querulous garrulity. But the tale which it 
introduces — a versification from the Gesta Romanoriim about the 
Emperor Jereslaus"s wife — and a later Story of Jonathas, are not bad 
of their kind, while the poem which comes between them, and which 
is connected with all that have been mentioned since the Complaint, 
Ars Utilissima sciendi mori, is, in a different vein, their equal. It 
is, like most of the work of this time and of this poet, merely a 
translation, though of what original is not quite certain. But there is 
a much healthier and manlier tone in it than in the puling regrets of 
the Male Rele for wasted health and feeble follies gone. The 
fifteenth century thought much of Death, and the thought was here, 
as elsewhere, tonic. The whining poltroon of the retrospect of 
life faces the prospect of death with no sham philosophy, and if not 
without fear, yet in humility and faith. 

For those, and perhaps only for those, who desire to appreciate 
at first hand the strange paralysis of humour and harmony, of 
grace and strength, which came upon the successors of Chaucer and 
Langland, it may be worth while to turn over the work of Osbern 
Bokenam (= probably Buckenham),^ whose Legends of the Saints, in 
some 10,000 lines of decasyllables variously arranged in Chaucerian 
fashions, have had the very undeserved honour of two reprints,^ 
chiefly, it would seem, because they represent the not very common 
dialect of Suffolk. Bokenam, who, as we learn from a 
note in the MS., was a Suffolk man, a Doctor of 
Divinity, and an Austin Friar of Stoke Clare, tells the lives of Saints 
Margaret, Anne, Christina, the Eleven Thousand, Faith, Agnes, 
Dorothy, Mary Magdalene, Katharine, Cecily, Agatha,^ Lucy, and 
Elizabeth of Hungary, in verse of rather more smoothness than 
some of his contemporaries could manage, but of a saltlessness, an 
absence of flavour, sparkle, piquancy, bite, which is desperate and 
almost inconceivable. Not St. Margaret and the Dragon, not St. 
Katharine and the Wheel, not even that lovely legend of St. Dorothea, 
which might draw poetry from an expert in phonetics, can inspire 

1 " Dr. Bokenham of Bury " occurs, however, in Roger North. 

2 By Stevenson for the Roxburghe Club, and by Horslmann (Heilbronn, 1883). 
* "Agas" in the linglisli, a form iilentical with the original of "haggis." 



CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 163 

Bokenam with anything beyond the mildest prettiness of expression, 
and this he very seldom reaches. The most interesting thing in the 
whole book is the statement in the same end-note that Thomas Burgh 
had the poem copied in Cambridge in the year of Our Lord 1447, 
at the cost of thirty shillings — which sum can seldom have been 
either worse spent or more hardly earned either by town or gown in 
that locality. 

Indeed, after making every allowance for the attempts, estimable 
if not delectable, of Lydgate and Occleve to keep English poetry 
alive during the first half of the tifteenth century, it is impossible not 
to be struck, not merely with the extremely moderate success of their 
own eftorts, but witli the paucity of any attempt to support them among 
their contemporaries. What we may call the Apocrypha of Piers 
Plowman^ the Creed, and the Tale (vide supra) may belong to the 
beginning of this century as well as to the end of tJie 
last. So may the verses of the Shropshire poet, Aude- "Mhftfrs!" 
lay,i who, like Langland himself, was a reformer without 
being a Wyclifite. To the first quarter of the fifteenth century belong 
William of Nassington, a Yorkshire writer of sacred verse, who 
perhaps belongs to the tradition of Hampole ; and Hugh Campden, 
another translator, the author of the moral romance of Boctus and 
Sidrac. The hapless Prince Edward, son of Henry VL and Margaret 
of Anjou, before Clarence stabbed him in the field by Tewkesbury, 
underwent the minor pain of having a moral poem on the Active 
Policy of a Prince written for him by a certain George Ashby, Clerk 
of the Signet to his motlier, and an aged Chaucerian. One of Caxton's 
books is a verse translation of Cato's Morals, by Benedict Burgh, done 
about 1470 ; and the last quarter saw some curious alchemical verses 
by George Ripley and Thomas Norton. But this, and perhaps a 
little more of the same kind, purely curious and appealing only to 
the robuster kind of curiosity, is all that bridges in England the 
space between Lydgate and Occleve in the early part of the fifteenth 
century, and Hawes and Skelton in the beginning of the sixteenth. 
There is, it is true, some anonymous matter of far greater interest 
which may represent this interval, and which will be dealt with in a 
later chapter. But even this is but scanty in amount.^ 

Very little is known of Stephen Hawes, and that little does not 
include the date either of his birth or of his death. He is said to 

1 Ed. Halliwell, Percy Society, 1844. A selection only. The MS. is dated 
1426, and Audelay lived and wrote as late as the reign of Henry VI. He has 
"bob and wheel" stanzas, sometimes alliterated and sometimes not, Romance 
sixains, a system composed of triplet octosyllables separated by single lines, 
monorhymed throughout the poem, etc. 

2 I know the writers mentioned in this paragraph, after Audelay and Nassing- 
ton, onlv at second hand. 



i64 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

have been a gentleman of birth, an Oxford man, a pretty considerable 
traveller, a master of modern languages, a man of great memory 
(seeing he could repeat by heart the works of Lydgate), 
and tlie possessor of a critical faculty somewhat smaller, 
inasmuch as he made that voluminous person equal in some respects 
with Geoffrey Chaucer. It is said with probability that he was 
Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII. ; he certainly wrote verses to 
congratulate Henry VIII. on his accession; and it seems likely that 
he died in Suffolk in early middle age, certainly before 1530, and 
probably about 1523. 

Wynkyn de Worde printed collections of the poems of Hawes — 
the Pastime of Pleasure, by which he is now almost solely known, in 
1509, witli some more pieces and the Example of Virtue in 15 12. 
The Pastime was reprinted by Wright for the Percy Society,^ un- 
luckily with §ome omissions. Mr. Arber's long-promised reprint of 
his other poems has, still more unfortunately, never appeared. But 
the text of the Pastime, and the abstract of the Exajiiple contained in 
Professor Henry Morley's English Writers^- make an estimate easy 
enough. Hawes has been said to belong to "the Pro- 
of^Pleasure. ven9al school," a statement of course entirely erro- 
neous, and due to the confusion between Provencal and 
French, which was at one time excusable, but has long ceased to be 
so. He is, in fact, a Chaucerian who has deepened one particular 
colour of Cliaucerism by recurrence to the Romance of the Rose itself, 
and still more to the heavier following of its allegory in the fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries by French and English writers. The Pastime 
of Pleasure, or the history of Graund-Amour and La Bel Pucell, is, 
like Gavin Douglas's contemporary King Hart, simply an allegory 
of the life of man. The hero passes the meadow of youth ; chooses 
tlie path of Active Life, neglecting the Contemplative or Monastic ; is 
introduced to the Seven Daughters of Doctrine (the Trivium and 
(2uadrivium) ; meets La Bel Pucell, determines to obtain her, but is 
exposed to some danger by the misguidance of a comic slanderer of 
women, Godfrey Gobilive ; destroys a three-headed giant and non- 
descript monster, so forcing his way to La Bel Pucell ; is received by 
the Virtues, and married to his beloved by Law. He lives happily 
with her till Age strikes him with infirmities and the vice of Avarice. 
Contrition comes in time, however, before Death, and he is buried 
by Mercy and Charity and epitaphed by Fame. 

Thus presented in its bare scheme or skeleton, the poem may 
well seem (to use a Drydenian phrase) but a cool and insignificant 
thing. Nothing is more dead to us, hardly anything perhaps seems 

1 1845. ' ^''- 75~8i' 



CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 165 

more certain of no resurrection, than this bald yet childish form of 
allegory, which lacks alike the vivid passages, the attractive, dreamlike 
transformations, and the fiery intensity of Langland, the gorgeous 
romance of Spenser and his perfect poetic skill, the amiable humanity 
and vivid novel-interest of Bunyan. In the two last of these cases — 
perhaps even in the first — the allegory, though ever present, is present 
in the background ; it will come when called, but does not obtrude 
itself; in Hawes it is pitilessly obtrusive at every step. Further, 
the poet is singularly ill-provided with the means of his art. He is far 
from being such a " dull dog" as Occleve ; he has perhaps more flashes 
of poetry than Lydgate. But either the venerable Wynkyn was false 
to the central principle of all good printing, " Follow copy even if it 
flies out of the window," or else Hawes was less able to keep up any 
standard of correct and musical versification than even these his 
predecessors. Both his rhymes-royal and his couplets (both are used 
in the Fastiiiie) are subject to the strangest lapses, to fits of a kind of 
verse-giddiness or epilepsy. 

The ExiDiipIe of Virtue, entirely, it would seem, in rhyme-royal, 
appears from the abstract above referred to to be even more nakedly 
allegoric than the Pastime of Pleasure. The usual invocation of the 
unequal three — Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate ■ — is fol- 
lowed by the usual dream. Youth is escorted by Dis- of virtue.^ 
cretion, voyages over the sea of Vain Glory to an island 
where are the castles of Justice, Nature, Fortune, Courage, and 
Wisdom ; is engaged to Cleanness ; is tempted by Lust, Avarice, and 
Pride ; fights with a three-headed dragon (Hawes cannot spare the 
three-headed dragon) ; is new dubbed by Virtue ; marries Cleanness, 
and is finally translated with her to Heaven. The three are once more 
invoked, and the poem ends. Of course, in both these poems there 
is a certain faint adumbration of the Faerie (2ueen — its outline with- 
out its glorious filling-in, its theme without its art, its intellectual 
reason for existence without any of its aesthetic justification thereof. 
It is not improbable that Spenser did know Hawes ; but if so he 
owed him a very small royalty. The merit of this poet is that he 
manages occasionally to lighten his darkness with flashes, to refresh 
his desert with flowers, of by no means mediocre poetry. We owe 
to him one of the oldest forms, if not the oldest form, of the beautiful 
saying — 

Be the day weary, or be the day long, 
At length it draweth to evensong. 

For which and other things he may be forgiven such intolerable 
matter as the following, which deserves its place as a general example 
of the worse side of fifteenth-century poetry : — 



i66 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

And if the matter be joyful and glad, 
Like countenance outwardly they make; 
But moderation in their minds is had, 
So that outrage may them not overtake. 
I cannot write too much for their sake 
Them to laud, for my time is short 
And the matter long which I must report. 

Pasture of Pleasure, cap. xii. last stanza. 

It is between Hawes and Skelton that we may perhaps most con- 
veniently mention a third writer, who is even more of a mere curiosity 
than Hawes himself, but who is as characteristic of his time as either. 
This is Alexander Barclay,^ the Englisher of the famous 

Barclay 

NarrenscJiiff of Sebastian Brandt. As far back as 
Bale's time (that is to say, in the age just after his own, and 
partly overlapping it) there was a doubt whether Barclay was a Scot 
or an Englishman. The spelling of his name would incline to the 
former hypothesis, which also has early authority of the positive 
kind ; but no connection of any sort is known between Barclay and 
Scotland, all his associations are with the South and South-west of 
England, and the spelling (always a very untrustworthy guide) is after 
all merely the pronounced form of *' Berkeley." His literary qualities 
are scarcely such that the two divisions of the island need fight very 
keenly for him. He must have been born somewhere about the 
beginning of the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and pretty 
certainly had a University education. The only allusion traced in 
his woik is to Cambridge,- but Scots more often went to Oxford, and 
Oxford had more connection with the West country. He was certainly 
for some time chaplain of the College of St. Mary Ottery, in Devonshire 
(the future birthplace of Coleridge), and seems there to have translated 
the Ship of Fools,^ which Pynson published in 1508, dedicated to 
Bishop Cornish of Exeter. He may have had poetical employment 
at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, was a monk at Ely, and after the 
dissolution of the monasteries obtained livings in Essex and Somerset 
under Edward VI., as well as later, just before his death in 1552, 
that of Allhallows, Lombard Street. 

Barclay's work was extensive, but chiefly translated. He " did " 
Gringore's Castle of Labor before the Ship, and after it some more, 
though not wholly, original Eclogues, of which the Citizen and 

1 Warton has given a rather full account of Barclay (iii. 189-203, ed. 1871), 
and Ritson is as usual to the point in four pages of the Bibliographia Foetica. 
But the long introductions to the modern editions mentioned below are the 
tilings to consult. 

♦ Trumpington, also mentioned, would prove nothing, because Chaucer had 
made it a place of literature. 

3 Very handsomely reprinted, with the woodcuts, by T. H. Jamieson 
(Edinburgh, 2 vols. 410, 1874). 



CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 167 

Uplandislwian ^ is the only one easily accessible in full. Divers other 
works, some of them extant, are assigned to him, and he seems in 
one. Contra Skeltonn/n, to have made a formal onslaught on a poet at 
Vv-hom his existing poems contain more than one iiing. 

Barclay seems really to deserve the place of first Eclogue-writer 
in English, if any one cares for this fortuitous and rather futile variety 
of eminence. His Eclogues, moreover, are not merely more original, 
but, so far as they are accessible, seem to be less jejune 
than the Ship. This latter owes its fame partly to its '^^^/oou. ""^ 
rarity before the reprint of five and twenty years ago, 
partly to the famous and really admirable woodcuts which it contains. 
The first "fole" — the possessor of unprofitable books — has a certain 
savour of i^romise which is unluckily but seldom fulfilled afterwards. 
Still, mainly thanks to the illustrations and to the general sympathy 
with Puck in seeing and saying, '' Lord, what fools these mortals be ! " 
it is possible to make one's way through the long catalogue which fills 
from two thousand to two thousand five hundred stanzas of rhyme- 
royal. The individual line is rather an interesting one, showing a 
sort of intermediate stage between the would-be rigid decasyllable of 
Lydgate and Occleve and the long rambling twelves or fourteeners of 
the mid-sixteenth century poets. Sometimes Barclay permits him- 
self a full Alexandrine ; oftener (in fact, in the majority of cases) he 
lengthens out his line with trisyllabic feet, so arranged as sometimes 
to take very little keep of the iambic basis. This same line is found 
in the Eclogues, arranged mainly in couplets, but with 
insertions in stanza, such as the allegorical octaves describ- ^ '^ ogues. 
ing the Tower of Virtue in the Fourth Eclogue. In tlie first three 
(paraphrased from Aeneas Silvius) the speakers are Coridon and 
Cornix, in the fourth Codrus and Menalcas, in the fifth (the Citizen 
and Uplandishf/ian [countryman]), Augustus and Faustus. They have 
for almost pervading subject that rather monotonous grumbling at 
the vices, follies, and ingratitude of courts which was the natural 
result of the Tudor concentration of the fountains not merely of 
honour but of profit in the sovereign, and of which we find more 
than an echo in Spenser. 

No more curious instance of literary contrast could possibly be 
provided than that which is supplied by the writer who is always coupled 
with Hawes, and sometimes with Barclay, his enemy. 
The birthplace of John Skelton - is given with the 
very sufficient variants of Cumberland and Norfolk ; his birth-year 

1 Ed. Fairbolt, for the Percy Society, 1847. The introduction contains very 
full extracts from the other four. 

- A handy edition appeared in 1736. Chalmers included Skelton in his 
Pocfs, and Dyce re-edited him in 1843. 



i68 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

must have been somewhere about 1460, and so in a not uninteresting 
way he takes up in the cradle the torch which Lydgate and Occleve 
dropped in the tomb. He was jjretty certainly a Cambridge man, 
and was M.A. in 1484. His earliest poem is thought to be one on 
the death of Edward IV., which is noteworthy, like Dunbar's Lanient 
for t/ie Makers, for a Latin refrain, melancholy in tone. Caxton in 
1490, and in the preface to his Aeiieid, speaks of Skelton's scholar- 
ship with reverence, and tells us that he was Poet Laureate in the 
University of Oxford. This title, which Skelton also enjoyed from 
Louvain and Cambridge, has caused mistakes which seem even yet 
not to be universally cleared up. Perhaps it is too much to speak of 
it as a " degree " ; it was rather, in old Oxford language, a " position " 
in rhetoric and poetics (then practically confounded) which necessi- 
tated a verse-thesis. It had nothing to do, except accidentally, 
with the modern sense of " Poet Laureate," which practically comes 
into existence with Ben Jonson and the seventeenth century. 

Skelton seems to have been one of the numerous \i\.tr2iry protegis 
of Lady Margaret and her son Henry VII. ; he took orders in 1498, 
when he must have been no longer a young man, and was tutor to 
Henry VIII. At this time Erasmus follows Caxton 
as his encomiast. He became rector of Diss, in his 
(probably) native county, Norfolk, before 1504. Up to this time, 
when he was far advanced in middle life, he seems to have been 
continuously prosperous and well-reputed. He lived twenty-five 
years longer, during which he became a complete Ishmaelite. The 
beginning of his trouble seems to have been that he married. At 
any rate he was suspended for this offence (or perhaps not for 
marriage at all) at some time not clearly known, and seems to liave 
gone to London. The King favoured his old tutor, but either 
from jealousy or sheer quarrelsomeness, or, as his partisans maintain, 
reforming zeal, he fell foul of Wolsey, whose friend he had previously 
been. A series of satires on the minister made it necessary for 
Skelton to take refuge in the sanctuary of Westminster, where he 
died in 1529, probably near his full term of days, and only a year 
before the former friend, now foe, on whom his pupil, and Wolsey's 
master, somewhat ungratefully revenged him. 

One point which distinguishes nearly, not quite, all Skelton's verse 
from that of Hawes is that it is thoroughly alive. The Crtnvn of 
Laurel, a stately, sterile, eminently fifteenth-century piece, mainly in 
rhyme-royal and aureate language, does indeed meet us in the fore- 
front of his work and inspire doubt and dread — 

Aulus Gellius, that noble historian, 
Grace also with his newe poetry, 
Master Terence, the famous comicar. 



CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 169 

are lines likely to "strike a chill." But if Skelton was not equal 
to '* new poetry " himself, he could at any rate rebel against the old ; 
if he could not write musically, he could at any rate take 
refuge in the doggerel of talent and almost of genius. '^ ^° "'^" 
Even this very poem, with its addresses to various young ladies of 
high birth, contains, in the short staccato metres that Skelton loved — 
to Margaret Hussey ("Merry Margaret As Midsummer flower"), to 
Isabel Pennell ("My maiden Isabel, Whose mammy and whose daddy 
Brought forth a goodly baby"), to Gertrude Statham ("Mistress 
Gertrude, With Womanhood Endued"), — very pleasant examples of 
better things. The Boi/gc of Court retains the dim and dreary 
personages — Dread, Suspicion, Disdain, Favell, etc. — • of allegory. 

The real Skelton, taking the order of his works as usually printed, 
emerges first in a very long, very boisterous, very rude, and in part 
rather childish and ignoble, but curiously spirited and fresh, ballad 
of triumph over the Duke of Albany, who ran away shamefully with 
a hundred thousand "tratland Scots and faint-hearted Frenchmen" 
beside the water of Tweed. Here — in almost the shortest possible 
lines, anapaestic in general character and for the most part of two 
feet only, rhymed in couplet, and with language sometimes almost 
inarticulate in its bubbling volubility, strongly alliterated, using the 
repeated beginning of the line freely — Skelton crows and whoops at 
the defeated enemy with a heartiness that may not be chivalrous, but 
is certainly unfeigned. Speak Parrot, in rhyme-royal, is an odd 
mixture of the author's favourite half-gibberish doggerel with 
" aureate " language and " rhethorike " — indeed, it is impossible not 
to see a deliberate satire on the second in both constituents. The 
above-mentioned Dirge on Edward IV. is, of course, quite serious, 
couched in twelve-lined stanzas of decasyllabics decidedly Occlevian in 
their character, with the refrain Qjtia ecce tiimc in pulvcre dorinio. 
Against the Scots, a song of triumph for Flodden, is a duplication 
of the other crow, but rather more ignoble because the triumph and 
the tragedy were both greater. This is partly in " Skeltonics," 
partly in octosyllables. Ware the Haivkcl is pure doggerel satire; 
and then a few serious pieces introduce us to what is perhaps 
Skelton's most vigorous, though certainly not his most elegant, work, 
the Tunning of Eleanor Rmnniing. This is a more than Hogarthian 
sketch, in language which might make Swift or Smollett squeamish, 
of the brewing and drinking of a certain browst of ale by a country 
ale-wife and her customers. This is wholly in the Skeltonian dimeter 
or monometer, which, it should be observed, has a tendency now and 
then to fall into six-syllabled iambics or seven-syllabled trochaics for 
longer or shorter breaks, the centre of the verse shifting precisely in 
the same fashion as in the Genesis and Exodus or Christabel metre. 



lyo THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY BOOK iv 

of which, in fact, this is undoubtedly a shortened and doggerelised 
variant for satiric' purposes. In this form it pervades Skelton's two 
chief political satires against Wolsey, U'/iy cotne yc not to Court and 
the Book of Colin Clout, as well as the Book of Philip Sparrow, 
his most whimsical and graceful thing, a long desultory mourning for 
the pet bird of Mistress Joan Scrope. 

In these, and in Skelton's minor poems, the chief of which are a 
Lament on the Death of the Earl of Aforthu/nberland and a morality 
called iMagnificence, we see a fertile, restless, and ingenious spirit 
entirely unprovided with the proper means of expression, and just 
falling short of the intelligence and originality necessary to elaborate 
such means for itself. It is impossible not to recognise in the 
" Skeltonics " an attempt, crude and clumsy it is true, to get away from 
the intolerable dulness and dryness of the stanza-decasyllable, as 
it appears in Hawes and the earlier fifteenth-century poets. To this 
day it is difficult to see why this fit of stuttering should have come 
upon English. At the beginning and at the end of the 150 
years of it (to pass over Skelton's younger contemporaries Wyat and 
Surrey for reasons) we find Chaucer before and Sackville afterwards 
making the seven or eight-lined stanza decasyllables the instrument 
of music, sweet or stately, merry or sorrowful, at their pleasure and 
with no sort of difficulty. Between them (to borrow a phrase from 
Mr. Swinburne of another matter) it seems almost impossible for an 
English poet to "clear his mouth of pebbles and his brow of "fog." 

Probably at no time would Skelton have been a great poet in the 
serious and passionate way — probably, at all, his genius would have 
inclined to comedy and to satire. As it is, he holds a position with 
Butler as the chief English verse-writer who has deliberately preferred 
to be burlesque to the verge, and in his case considerably over the 
verge, of grotesque and doggerel. In comparing the two men, whose 
powers, natural and acquired, do not seem to have been very different, 
while their tempers were also not dissimilar (Skelton inclining rather 
to the jovial, Butler to the saturnine), it is impossible not to re- 
member that Butler came just after, as Skelton came just before, the 
enormous, the incalculable advances made by the Elizabethan period, 
not merely in language and metre, but in everything, small and great, 
that pertaijis to the business of poetry. And we ought to give the 
authoi- of Philip Sparrow and Eleanor Rtimming and Why come ye 
not to Court a substantial allowance for the fact. 



CHAPTER II 

THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, AND MINOR 

Lateness of Scottish Literature — Barbour — Wyntoun — Blind Harry — Minors — 
Lyndsay — His life — His works — The Satire of the Three Estates — Minor 
poems 

Although the literary eminence of the quartette of poets who will 
be discussed in the next chapter is unquestioned, even the earliest of 
them (taking him to have been James the First) was not the first known 
poet of Scotland. That position, assigned by tradition or imagina- 
tion, first to Thomas of Erceldoune, and then to the still more 
shadowy " Huchowne," belongs historically to John Barbour, Arch- 
deacon of Aberdeen, and author of the Brus, which was finished in 
1375. The reasons of this extraordinary lateness, and Latenes f 
the still more extraordinary lagging of prose (of which, Scottish 
except laws, letters, and a few translations, ^ etc., we iterature. 
have nothing till the Coniplaitit of Scotland, hard on the middle of 
the sixteenth century), are too conjectural to be argued out here. 
Attention can only be called to the following facts, which (though 
some of them are even now sometimes attacked) are absolutely indis- 
putable. They are these : that the establishment of a separate kingdom 
in any sense corresponding to what we call Scotland was very late ; 
that this kingdom when established consisted of, or rested on, the 
debris of four different nationalities and languages — those of the 
Picts, of the Scots of Dalriada, of the Britons of Strathclyde, 
and of the Anglo-Danes of Northumbria; that the literary chances 
of the last, where only an English literature could have arisen, were 
ruined by the Danish invasion, and not recovered till, after the 
Norman conquest of England, English was everywhere undergoing a 
process of moulting which made literature impossible ; that even in 
the comparatively halcyon tiines of the Alexanders, English (all the 
Scottish writers up to Douglas invariably call their language 

1 It is not improbable that a version of the Bible now in hand for the Scottish 
Text Society may be of the early fifteenth century, but it is pretty certainly based 
on Wyclif. 

171 



172 



THE FIFrEENTIi CENTURY 



"Inglis," and if they use "Scots" at all, mean Gaelic by it) was yet 
unformed ; and that from the latter half of the thirteenth to the latter 
half of the fourteenth century the War of Independence, and the 
turbulent state in which Scotland emerged from it, made literature 
improbable, if not actually impossible. 

At any rate, whether it be strange or not, that we have nothing 
earlier than Barbour, the author of the Brus^ is a fact and indispu- 
table. His identification with the Archdeacon rests on the testimony of 
his immediate successor, Wyntoun, and of the Arch- 

^■^ ""'■• deacon we have divers documentary notices. These do 
not include the date or place of his birth. The former is guessed 
at as about 1320. Our first notice of him is thirty-seven years later, 
when in 1357 Edward III. granted him license to come, with three 
scholars, to Oxford to study, to stay there and exercise scholastic 
acts, and to return to Scotland, where, it must be remembered, there 
was as yet no University. Seven years later he had a similar safe- 
conduct to the same place, and at other times others to go to France, 
also for the sake of study. The other references, which are numer- 
ous, refer chiefly to payments of pensions, etc., and do not concern 
literature. He died in March 1395. 

Besides the Brics there have of late years been assigned to 
Barbour, and taken away from him by turns, a fragment of a Troy 
Book and a very large collection of Lives of the Saints.'^ In dialect 
and metre these are similar to the Briis itself; but they are naturally 
less interesting, being simply members of a very large class, and 
treating common matter in common form, while the Bnes stands 
quite by itself. Even as a historical document — though it takes 
some remarkable liberties with fact, confusing Bruce with his own 
grandfather, making him refuse an offer of the crown from Edward, 
etc. — it is not despicable. It was written (we have the exact date in 
a passage of its own) less than fifty years after Bnice's death, and by 
a man who was probably nearly ten years old at the date of that death, 
so that he had ample opportunity for communication with direct wit- 
nesses. That Barbour takes, as every mediaeval writer, almost without 
exception, invariably did take, license of embellishing, altering, supply- 
ing, omitting, to suit his own notions of the story, is not so much 
probable as certain, but it is not material. As a poet, Barbour, if 
not taking very high rank, is very far indeed from being desi^icable. 
His famous and often quoted outburst about freedom does not seem 
to be, by any means, a mere commonplace, and many of his descrip- 
tive passages (the pursuit of Bruce by John of Lorn being only one 

1 Frequently edited. The Scottish Text Society's issue by Professor Skeat 
(Edinburgh, 1894) is the one I have used. 

2 Also in the Scottish Text Society's issues. Ed. Metcalfe, Edinburgh, 1896. 



CHAP. 11 THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL AND MINOR 173 

of them) fully rise to the level required. It would be absurd to 
compare Barbour to Chaucer or to Langland, but, with a little less 
elegance, he has more spirit than Gower. 

Poetry was not the strong point of his younger contemporary 
and immediate successor in the verse-chronicling of Scottish history, 
Andrew Wyntoun, Canon of St. Andrews and Prior of St. Serf in 
Lochleven. His birth- and death-dates are not known, 
but he certainly held his priory from 1395 (Barbour's v" °""- 
death-year) to 1413 at least; and he was alive six years later, for 
he notices the death of Robert Duke of Albany in 141 9. 1350- 
1420 would therefore (as he speaks of old age having mastered him) 
be a probable life-date. The title of "Original Chronicle" which 
he gave to his work ^ does not, as Dr. Irving ^ seems rather oddly 
to have thought, claim " originality " in our common modern sense 
— indeed, Wyntoun very frankly quotes many authors down to 
Barbour. It signifies that he began at the beginning — origo — after 
the wont of the mediaeval chronicler. His verse is less poetical than 
Barbour's in spirit but a little more accomplished in form, attaining 
the trisyllabic swing of the Christabel metre sometimes with very 
good effect, as witness the line in his often quoted account of 
Macbeth and the Weird Sisters — 

Lo ! yon | der the thane | of Crum | bauchty | [Cromarty]. 

And anotlier in reference to the Maid of Norway — 

To Nor I way and Scot | land both right | wise heir. 

He has not a few passages interesting for matter — as far as 
manner goes the interview between the Devil and St. Serf (Book v. 
chap, xii.) is a very fair specimen. It is from him that we have the 
well-known and interesting piece " When Alexander our King was 
dead," which, however, can hardly be contemporary with the event it 
commemorates. 

The transition, from Wyntoun's easy amble of manner (not seldom 
degenerating into a mere pedestrian verse) and his placid chronicling, 
to the next writer on this special list is not a little curious. Barbour 
had been patriotic beyond all dispute, and he had not 
been over-squeamish about dressing up the facts of his- '" ^^' 
tory to better advantage in the garb of romance. Wyntoun, with more 
sense of history, had been patriotic too ; but neither showed any 
violent animosity against England, and an Englishman must compare 
with some compunction the international courtesy of Laurence Minot 

1 Twice edited — in part by D. Macpherson (1795) and in whole by Laing 
(1872-79). 

2 History of Scottish Poetry, p. 116. 



174 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

and theirs. Both were cosmopolitan, and the method of Barbour himself 
was rigidly critical, as compared with Blind Harry,^ or, as modern 
punctilio prefers to call him, "'Henry the Minstrel," the poetical 
biographer of the other great hero of the War of Independence. 
The author himself is a very obscure person. The locus classicus 
about him is a passage of the same Latin-writing historian, John 
Mair or Major, who is our authority for the authorship of the A7;/^V 
Quair. Mair says that Henricus, blind from his birth, executed 
the poem in his (the historian's) infancy, which is judged to have 
been cir. 1460. We have only one MS. of it, and that is dated 
1488, while we have some records of payments to Henry as late as 
1492, and Dunbar includes him among the Dead Makers in 1508. 
The last three-quarters of the fifteenth century would therefore seem 
to have been his date, and the text of his poem, if not directly taken 
down from his dictation, to have been at least contemporary. 

Sir irillia/n H'allace consists of nearly 12,000 lines in heroic 
couplets, often very spirited, and generally correct enough in con- 
struction, but observing the sharp French caesura at the fourth 
syllable. It purports to be based on a Latin book by John Blair, 
Wallace's own chaplain ; but no such book is known to have existed, 
nor is it referred to by any authority, except such as have obviously 
derived their knowledge from Harry himself. Nor does it need 
more than the slightest examination of the poem to see that it is in 
substance, though not in form, a true chanson de geste, having only 
the remotest foundation in history, and weaving its story perhaps out 
of some popular traditions, but mainly out of the poet's own head or 
the heads of his unknown predecessors. It is well known that the 
authentic documents for Wallace's history are extremely meagre. 
Barbour never mentions his name. But Wyntoun, long before 
Harry, says that great gestes of him existed, and suggests that 
a "great buke " (the opposition is not unnoteworthy) might be 
written. It is by no means improbable that blind Harry took the 
hint directly from the good prior of St. Serf. By his time the 
national animosity between Scots and English, according to a 
custom odd at first sight but not unintelligible, had grow-n much 
more fierce than during the actual Wars of Independence in the 
previous century. And Harry's verses are inspired by the hottest 
flame of this. The presence of indignation and the absence of in- 
formation combine in him to make an exceedingly spirited romance, 
which was naturally and deservedly popular in Scotland ft-om the 
very first, but which, of course, has the sliglitest — if the slightest — 
pretence to historical importance. The ghostly apparition of Faw- 
done, in the finest passage of all, is not more a tiling of the imagi- 
1 Scottish Text Society, ed. Moir. 



CHAP. II THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL AND MINOR 175 

nation than the still more famous fishing story with which the poem 
opens, or the stock incident (very freshly and excellently told) of the 
visit of the Queen of England to Wallace, and her mediation with 
her no less cowardly than ferocious husband. But it was all perfectly 
right and proper, according to the laws of the class of composition to 
which Blind Harry's work belongs ; and it is a compensation for the 
e.xtreme lateness and comparative scantiness of Scottish literature 
that it was thus able to produce the latest, and very far indeed 
from the worst, example of the national folk-epic which blends 
traditions of all sorts, adds commonplaces from the general stock 
of fiction, and makes the whole thick and slab with original sauce, 
in order to exalt and consecrate the deeds of a popular hero. 

It may be not inconvenient here, before coming to the last of the 
batch of historical poets or verse-writers who form the staple of this 
chapter, and who in this case extend beyond the fifteenth century 
proper, to note very briefly the minor poets of this and 
the other class who complete the list of the makers 
of the fifteenth century itself, as we have them on the authority of 
Dunbar and others. The chief of these was Walter Kennedy, Dun- 
bar's contemporary and antagonist in the " flyting" {xnde infra), who 
took his degree at Glasgow in 1476, and is spoken of not as dead 
but dying in the Coinplaint of the Makers, published therewith. 
There are poems of Kennedy's in existence, but mostly unpublished, 
and said to be of no great merit. Others who are not mere names 
are Richard, or Sir Richard Holland, a Douglas's man, who wrote 
about the middle of the century the Book of the Hozulat,^ alliterated 
and rhymed, describing a general council of the Birds, with the Pea- 
cock as Pope-President ; and Clerk of Tranent, who is spoken of as 
having made the ''Anturs of Gawane" {vide supra). To him may 
be due the existing Golagros and Gawaiie, an alliterative rhymed 
poem of the Gawain Northern cycle {ante,^. 103, and post, p. 195). 
Mersar, two Rowls or Rolls, and others are but shadows, and only a 
single poem seems to remain by Quentin Shaw, a poet who is not 
only mentioned by Dunbar, but picturesquely introduced by Gawain 
Douglas — 

Quentin with ane huttock - on his head — 

1 This is in the Scottisli Text Society's Alliterative Poems, ed. Amours. 
Everybody knows the two short Unes — 

O Douglas, Douglas, Tender and true ! 

which end the wheel of stanza 31, and the whole passage dealing with Lord 
James and the heart of the Bruce is good. Otherwise not much can be said for 
the poem, which is a mere variation of the Parliament of Fo'ivls. 

~ i.e. a hood, probably like that in Chaucer's portrait, and copied from it by 
fifteenth-century poets, as those of the eighteenth copied Pope's nightcap. 



176 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

as one of the Scottish poets worthy to show cause against even 
Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. And to the poets who are thus 
without, or nearly without, poems, a list of poems at present un- 
attached to poets might be added, showing more evidence of the 
literary working in Scotland which began so late and was to die 
away, all but completely, so soon. 

It is probable that among these forgotten, scarcely known, and 
too often still disdained writers, there was more than one who was a 
better poet in the strict sense of that term than " Sir David Lyndsay 
of the Mount, Lord Lyon King of Arms," who, at the cost 
of a slight stretch of chronology, may best be mentioned 
here. But Lyndsay is an interesting, and though not a fully yet a 
fairly known personality, while they flit as shadows ; he has left an 
abundant supply of work,i frequently interesting in itself, and gener- 
ally characteristic of his time ; and in one particular he has the rare 
good luck to have left the only example, not merely in Scottish but 
in English literature, of an early sotie or political farce-satire in 
dramatic form. If he had given us nothing but tlie Satire of the 
Three Estates, Lyndsay would be a remarkable figure in English 
literature ; as it is, he has left much else. 

He is supposed, rather than known, to have been born at The 
Mount, near Cupar, in Fife, somewhere about 1490; but claims 
(also guesswork) have been put in for Garmylton or Garleton in East 
Lothian, an estate which certainly belonged to his father 
and to him. The family was an offshoot (whether legiti- 
mate or not is uncertain) of that of Lyndsay of the Byres. He may, 
rather than must, have been the " Da. Lyndsay " who was an incor- 
porated fourth-year student at St. Andrews in 1508-9. He cer- 
tainly had not merely a regular salary in the Royal Household, but 
a "play-coat of blue and yellow taffety " in 15 11, and played before 
King James IV. and Queen Margaret. He is said to have been 
present at the famous scene of the apparition to the King before 
Flodden, which is enshrined in Mannion. And he was master- 
usher, or master of the household, to James V. from his earliest 
childhood. In 1522 he was a married man, and his wife Janet 
Douglas was accustomed to sew the King's " sarkis " with double 
hanks of gold thread. James's very early nominal coming of age at 
his twelfth year caused the removal of Lyndsay, who retired to his 
estate of Garmylton and " commenced poet." But four years later 
James emancipated himself from his still real tutelage to Angus, and 
almost at once promoted his old master to knighthood and the office 
of Lyon King, which then involved very important diplomatic duties. 

1 Ed. Laing, Edinburgh, 3 vols. 1879. 



CHAP. II THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL AND MINOR 177 

In discharge of these Lyndsay went to England, France, the Nether- 
lands, and Denmark. He held a chapter of his heralds in January 
1555, and seems to have died between that month and the following 
April. 

Lyndsay's works consist of the above-mentioned Satire of the Three 
Estates, of a Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier, and of the 
History of Squire Meldruni, all long poems, with a considerable 
number of shorter ones. Of the long poems. The Dia- ^,. 

His works. 

logne (or The Monarchie) consists of more than 6000 
lines, chiefly octosyllabic couplets, and gives the history of the 
world, with comments in the dismallest manner of the fifteenth cen- 
tury. The History of Squire Meldruin, in the same metre, is an 
exceedingly pleasant romantic biography of a real person, a sort of 
cross between Quentin Uurward and the Admirable Crichton, whose 
prowess against Englishmen and others in the field, and his courtesy 
to ladies in the bower, are very lovingly depicted. The most note- 
worthy of the three, however (though, like them and Lyndsay's 
other poems, it is disfigured by the extraordinary coarseness of lan- 
guage which marks most of this early Scottish poetry, and which, 
except for a very brief time at the Restoration, and then chiefly in 
anonymous writings, has never been matched in England), is the 
Satire. This, as its length, not far short of 5000 lines, „, „ . 

T. he Scitifc 

makes inevitable, is not a single piece, but, on the of the 
model of the French compositions which no] doubt sug- Esutls 
gested it, a set or pentalogy of five different pieces : the 
first part of the play proper, the First and Second Interludes, the 
second part of the play, and the Third Interlude, while there is a 
preliminary interlude of between two and three hundred lines more 
which has been thought spurious, but with no apparent reason, and 
which is certainly not less vigorous than the rest, though it is if 
possible even coarser. 

The main play is a " morality " of the familiar kind (see next 
Book), but with the allegory deflected from its usual ethical tenor to 
a political bent, Rex Humanitas being tempted by Wantonness, 
Placebo, and the Vices in the habit of Friars, and saved by Correc- 
tion, Gude Counsel, and the Virtues. It is in the second part that 
the Three Estates make a direct appearance ; while the Interludes, 
not losing sight of the moral, enforce it with more farcical and 
general satire. It has been customary to regard Lyndsay as a partisan 
of the Reformation, and so, in the merely literal and grammatical 
sense, he certainly was. But it does not appear very certain that he 
was a partisan from any doctrinal side. 

This sharp satire on abuses in Church and State, perhaps 
mixed, as satire so often is, with some selfish consideration, appears 

N 



178 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

also in all, or almost all, Lyndsay's minor poems, which, if not over 

numerous, are very interesting. They scarcely reach a dozen in 

number, and, as has been said, grace of poetic style and 

poems. thought is by no means their prominent characteristic. 
But they all have a certain accompHshment of phrase 
and form which is extremely noteworthy in contrast with the stagger- 
ing state of English in both ways at the time, and more noteworthy 
still when we remember that the Scottish Muse was about to fall 
almost barren for centuries, while the English was in some fifty years' 
time to become the fruitful mother of the best poetry in the world. 
And they are all interesting, more or less, in matter. The Dream 
(which is in plain language a begging letter to the King) is in rhyme- 
royal, and tlie body of it is simply part of that vast and dreary 
common form of fifteenth-century allegory through which, as through- 
out this Book, we have to make our way. But the begging letter by 
itself has some very interesting biographical touches, reminding James 
how his master-usher had carried him in his arms and tucked him up 
in bed; how he had told him not merely "of Hercules the actis 
lionorabill," and much other improving matter, but the Prophecies of 
Rymour, Beid, and Marly ng, and tales of the Red Etin and the 
Gyre Carling, for which posterity would very cheerfully give twenty 
Dialogues between Experience and a Courtier. The Dream itself 
ranges from the centre of the Earth {i.e. Hell) and the description of 
Paradise, to the relations between France and Scotland and the state 
of Argyle and the Out Isles, wliich would appear not to have been 
Paradise at all. The piece, with all its parts included, considerably 
exceeds 1000 lines, and ends with a direct Exhortation to the 
King's Grace (in nine-line stanzas, with a different one as coda) which 
is manly and sensible. In fact, both Dunbar and Lyndsay deserve 
the highest credit for the absence of '• assentation " in their addresses 
to their patrons, James the Fourth and Fifth, though neither father 
nor son seems to have profited very much thereby. 

This manly tone is renewed in the Complaint of Sir David 
Lyndsay — some 500 lines in octosyllabic couplets — which is again 
biographical and again suppliant, but does not hesitate to mingle 
probably unpalatable advice with supplication. Nor is the Testament 
and Complaint of the Papyngo (the King's Parrot),, which is about the 
length of the Dream, and chiefly, but not wholly, in rhyme-royal, very 
different, being directed largely against various abuses in Church and 
State, especially the former. The Answer to the King's Flyting (the 
Flyting itself is lost) partakes of the studied coarseness of this 
singular form of poetical amusement. But Lyndsay's practical 
honesty makes him still more attentive to warning the " Red Tod of 
St. Andrews" against vice and disorder than to exercises in curious 



CHAP. 11 THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL AND MINOR 179 

ribaldry. Another court poem, probably not without si^ecial meaning, 
is the Petition of the King's old hound " Bagsche "' to his successors 
in favour, Bawtie and otliers, for " ane portion in Dunfermling," 
concluding with good advice. The poet's most important attempt in 
pathetic poetry, the Deploratio)i of Queen Magdalene, the fair and 
ill-fated French princess who was James's first wife, and to whom the 
climate of Scotland was almost at once fatal, is meritorious but hardly 
successful, Lyndsay being unable to extract from the rhyme-royal that 
plangent note which it so readily yields to true poets. He is happier, 
though still not consummately happy, in tlie comic handling of the 
Justing between Watson and Barbour and the Supplication in Con- 
tempt of Side Tails (trains), as well as in the rather famous anti- 
clerical Kitty''s Confession, to which the Description of Peddar Cofjls ^ 
is a kind of pendant. Lastly has to be mentioned the Tragedy of 
the Cardinal, a ferocious attack on the dead Beaton in the style of 
the Fall of Princes. 

1 i.e. " pedlar knaves," in senses both literal and transferred. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 

The King's Qtiair — Henryson — The Testament and Complaint of Creseide — The 
Fables — Robene and Makyne- — Minor poems — Dunbar — The Twa Maryit 
Wemen and the Wedo — Other large poems — Gawain Douglas — His life — 
His original poems — His Aeneid 

It has constantly been remarked as a most curious and partially 
unaccountable phenomenon, that while Chaucerian poetry, as soon as 
Chaucer's own hands failed, gave nothing but third-rate work or 
worse in England, it produced in Scotland work in some cases of 
very high quality indeed. Such account as is possible of the reasons 
for the general lateness of purely Scottish literature has been given 
in the last chapter. In this we shall give an account of the four 
chiefs of Scottish poetry when it did come — James the First, Robert 
Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gawain or Gavin Douglas. 

Criticism of the strenuously inert kind has played its usual games 
with the literary work of James Stewart, first king of the name in 
Scotland. After by turns attributing to him and taking away from 
him Christ's Kirk on the Green, Peebles to the Play, etc., it has 
recently attacked his claims, which for nearly four centuries had been 
undisturbed, on the Kingis (Jitair itself. Once more this history 
does not trouble itself with otiosities of the kind. It is sufficient 
that the Kingis Quair {qnire, book) is attributed to James by John 
Major or Mair, not an impeccable historian, but fairly near the time, 
and likely to know ; that it is also given as his in the MS., which 
seems to be still more nearly contemporary ; that no other attribution 
of the poem has any early authority ; and that nothing is to be gained 
by disturbing the accepted tradition. It is indeed unwi.se to try, as 
other freaks of the same tricksy spirit have done, to force the dramatic 
details of the poem too closely, or closely at all, into line with the 
historical events of James's life, or to insist that the locality of the 
poem is Windsor, the heroine Joan Beaufort, and so forth. For us 
it shall be sufficient that the unbroken and till now unopposed tradi- 

i8o 



CHAP. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS i8i 

tion of four centuries has given the Kingis Quair'^ to James the 
First of Scotland, and that though we cannot say on positive evidence 
that he did write it, absokitely no facts have been produced showing 
that he did not. With regard to Clirisfs Kirk on the Green and 
Peebles to the Play, two very lively and spirited, though slightly 
coarse, narrative ballads of a " Burnsish " cast, the case is difterent. 
Early attribution hesitates — a fatal thing — between James the First 
and James the Fifth as the author of Chrisfs Kirk on the Green, and 
its tone is much more suggestive of the " goodman of Ballengeich " 
than of his fierce but knightly great-great-grandfather. Also, though 
it is very difficult to speak of the older Scots with any certainty, 
the language certainly seems more recent than the early fifteenth 
century. 

On the contrary, the Kingis Qnair, if not by James, must be 
by some unknown Scottish poet who was under the fresh and full 
Chaucerian influence. This James would naturally have been, seeing 
that he was born in 1394, captured at sea by the 
English in 1405, and kept in an honourable captivity Quai/.^ 
in England till 1424, in which year, having married 
Joan Beaufort, Henry V.ls first cousin, he was allowed to ransom 
himself and return to Scotland. There he was crowned at Scone, 
ruled his turbulent realm with some justice, considerable ability and 
love of learning, and very great harshness, till 1436, wlien he was 
assassinated by not quite unreasonably wrathful rebels in the 
monastery of the Black Friars at Perth, despite (or not) of the 
heroism of "Kate Barlass." There was, if a slight variation of 
dialect, a complete unity of literary sentiment between England and 
Scotland at the time, and the increasing study of the French 
rhcioriqneiirs had not yet, as it was to do in Scotland even more than 
in England, aureated the vocabulary with too cumbrous a garment of 
brocaded diction. The piece, which is in stanzas of rhyme-royal 
(said indeed to be so named from it), has the drawbacks from which 
even Chaucer's own minor poems are not free, of the common form 
of the Rose tradition — the sleep, the dream, the vision of Paganly 
divine personages, the Deadly Sins, the Wheel of Fortune, and the 
rest. It has none of the direct dramatic faculty of Chaucer in the 
Tales or of Dunbar, none of the intense romantic power of Henry- 
son's Creseide, or the idyllic grace of his Robene and Makyne. But 
it has very much of the dreamy elegance of the Rose itself, in the 
passages describing how the weary dreamer looks out into the castle 
garden, and sees the gracious apparition of his love with golden hair, 

1 Ed. Skeat, Scottish Text Society. The arguments against James's author- 
ship have been carefully examined and replied to by M. Jusserand; but it was 
really unnecessary, for not one of them is even plausible. 



1 82 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

tricolour plumes in it, and a single ruby glowing on her breast ; the 
interview with Venus (that which follows with Minerva is a little 
owlish) ; the fine episode of Fortune ; and the final boon of red gilly- 
flowers brought him by the bird of Venus, the turtle-dove, with an 
encouraging inscription on the leaves. On the whole, if TJte Flower 
and Hie Leaf be not Chaucer's, it and the King''s Qiiair may be 
ranked as the two most graceful, scholarly, and elegant poems of the 
French-Chaucerian tradition to be found in English. The Ballad of 
Good Coiifisel, which is also ascribed by good authority to James, and 
is the only other piece bearing such attribution, is also, though in 
another kind, strongly Chaucerian, its refrain being — 

And for ilk inch He will thee quit a span, 

and breathing the .same mixture of pious humility and moral wisdom 
which appears in Flee from tlie Press, etc. Botii pieces, the Qiiair 
and the Ballad, are thus distinctly "school-work," owing almost 
everything, as far as mere originality goes, to Chaucer. But they are 
school-work of the best kind, standing to their masters as Luini's to 
Lionardo's in painting, and showing the highest ability in execution. 

Few poems whose personality is certain, and whose work is both 
eminent in merit and not inconsiderable in bulk, have a more 
shadowy record than Master Robert Henryson, schoolmaster in Dun- 
fermline, as he is entitled in editions of his work printed 

enryson. ^^^^^ sixty or seveuty years after his death. It may, 
in fact, be said that Dunbar's reference to that death in the Complaint 
of Hie Makers, which was written about 1506 — 

In Dunfermline he has done down, 
Good Master Robert Henryson ^ — 

is the only certain and positive reference that we possess to him. 
For it is not certain, though it is highly probable, that he is the 
Venerabilis vir Magister Robertus Henryson who was incorporated 
in the University of Glasgow (then scarcely ten years old) in 1462 ; 
and all attempts to identify him with the Henrysons or Hendersons 
of Fordell in Fife have quite failed. 

About his works,^ however, there is no reasonable doubt. They 
consist of two poems of some length, the Testament of Creseide and 
Orpheus and Eurydice ; of a collection, with prologue, of /Esopic 
fables in Scots ; and of rather more than a dozen miscellaneous 
minor poems, of which the chief is the somewhat famous pastoiirelle 

1 Readings vary. 

- Ed. Laing (Edinburgh, 1865), a book now very scarce and dear, which the 
Scottish Text Society hopes to re-edit. 



CHAP. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 183 

of Robeiie and Makyne. The total bulk is not large, but the merit 
is, for the fifteenth century more particulail}-, very high, and the 
variety of the directions in which it is shown is extremely remark- 
able. Of the two long poems, Orpheus and Eiirydice is partly in 
rhyme-royal, partly in couplets, with a ballade in ten-line stanzas 
interposed and a " morality " in couplets. If it stood alone it would 
not create aiiy very special position for its author. There are much 
better Middle English poems on the same subject ; and this is only 
a fair Chaucerian exercise, not better than the best of Lydgate, though 
much better than the worst of Occleve. 

Very diiferent is the Testament of Creseide^ (sometimes sub- 
divided into a " complaint " and a '' testament " proper), which 
undertakes to complete Chaucer's Troilns, and, not 
adopting the story of the jilted prince's speedy death, mentand 
to give that of Cressida's punishment. After a vigorous Complaint of 
prologue, describing how the poet in middle age, and a 
cold night, mended the fire, '' beikit him about," " tuik ane drink his 
spirits to comfort," and a book, the Troilus — 

To cut the winter night and make it short — 

he resolves to tell the sequel. Diomed, satiated with Cressida, 
deserts her as she has deserted his rival. She takes refuge with her 
father, Calchas, and will not show herself in public, but in '* ane 
secret oratoir " angrily reproaches Venus and her son. Cui^id, 
highly indignant, summons the council of the Gods^ to determine 
the punishment for this blasphemy, and it is referred to a committee 
consisting of Saturn and the Moon. Little mercy is to be expected 
from these two cold deities ; and there is singular force in the 
description of the sentence pronounced by Saturn. Passing down 
where careful Cressid lay, and placing a frosty wand on her head, he 
deprives her of all beauty and joy. Cynthia strikes her in addition 
with the incurable and loathsome signs of leprosy. The doom takes 
eflfect at once, and she has to seek the spital-house, where (in a nine- 
lined stanza) she makes her complaint. One of her wretched 
companions, not unkindly, bids her make virtue of necessity, give up 
useless wailing, 

And live efter the law of lipper-leid (= folk). 

So she goes forth with clapper and begging-dish. As she sits 
forlorn by the wayside, a gallant company rides by from Troy, 

1 This can be found in Chalmers's Poets and in Professor Skeat's Chauceriana. 

2 It is not superfluous to say that Mercury is " full of rhetoric," and has " a 
hude Like to ane Poeit of the auld fashioun " ; see note on Quentin Sliaw in the 
last chapter. 



i84 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 



Troilus among them. And then comes the crowning passage of 
the poem. Their eyes meet ; but her bleared vision does not 
recognise her former lover, and it is impossible for him to know 
Cressida in the ghastly creature beneath him. The stanzas describ- 
ing this situation are nearly perfect. She receives his guerdon, is 
told by one of her comrades who he is, utters one last complaint, 
and sending him a ruby ring he had once given her, dies. - 

The two great passages of the doom of Saturn and the meeting 
would of itself give this poem rank with, if not above, the best v^^ork 
of its century, but the whole is not unworthy of them. Only in 
Sackville is the power of tragic effect which rhyme-royal eminently 
'possesses brought out with equal fulness, and Sackville is less terrible 
than the Saturn piece, and less pathetic than the lovens' meeting. 

The powers of this remarkable stanza in the lighter way are not 
generally held to be as high as those in serious verse ; indeed, its 
great inventor or naturaliser in English usually deserted it for octo- 
syllables or heroics when he was bent on comedy. But 
Henryson has been not much less happy in his use of it 
for yEsop than in the Creseidc poem. His prologue is again personal, 
though less vivid; his fables are — -The Cock and the Jasp (Jasj^er) ; 
The Uplandish Mouse and the Burgess Mouse ; a Fox series — Sir 
Chantecleer and the Fox, The Fox confessing to the Wolf, The 
Parliament of Beasts; The Dog, Sheep, and Wolf; The Lion and 
the Mouse ; The Preaching of the Swallow ; The Fox, the Wolf, and 
the Cadger; The Fox, the Wolf, and the Moon's Shadow; The 
Wolf and the Wether; The Wolf and the Lamb; The Paddock 
(Frog) and the Mouse. Many of these are told at considerable 
length, extending to some hundreds of lines, and the moralitas of 
each, as we should expect in this moralising of all centuries, is 
prolonged to forty, fifty, sixty, or even more lines, but the general 
treatment is not at all heavy. 

There is, however, no doubt that Robenc and Makyne = Malkin 

(" Maudkin" not " Marykin," as is sometimes said), the best known 

of Henryson's poem from its fortunate inclusion in Percy's Rdiqiies, 

is, if not the best, superior to all except the Testa- 

^flakyn'e'^ wtv//. It is the Old French pastourelle, or shepherdess 

wooing-poem, with a difference. In the first part the 

usual order of things is inverted, and Makyne woos in vain the 

impassible and clownish object of her love. She is, in fact, '■'■Merry 

Makyne " by grace of the perpetual epithet only. But the God of 

Love avenges her : the moonlight and the " sweet season " work on 

Robin, and he in turn solicits her grace. But she has been heard 

and healed, and every fit reader of the ])oem has praised the simple 

but inimitably felicitous touches with which, in no undignified spirit 



CHAP. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCO'lTISII POETS 185 

of " tit for tat," but with the straightforwardness of the heart-whole, and 
not without a toucli of solemnity, she reminds him of the old saw — 

The man that will nocht when he may, 
Sail hauf nocht quhen he wald ; 

and to a second despairing plea of the soft dry night, the warm balmy 
air, the secret greenwood, replies — 

Robin, that world is all awa, 
And quite brocht to an end — 

and goes home no longer merely technically " merry," but blithe 
enough "among the holtis hoar," with (as we may supplement the 
description) chin no doubt slightly upturned in the moonlight, leaving 
the luckless fool " in dolour and in care." 

The remaining members of this small but admirable collection of 
verse are less interesting, though much above the standard of their 
time. The Ganiiond (Garment) of Good Ladies has been much praised, 
but its allegory — ''Her hat should be of fair-having"; 
'• Her sleeves should be of esperance " — too frequently '"""^ ^° "'^' 
takes an excursion beyond the agreeably quaint into the tediously 
grotesque. The Bludy Serk — the shirt of a knight who was 
desperately wounded in rescuing a lady from a giant, worn by her 
after his death — is better, but it is not improved by the inevitable 
moralitas (spared us in Robene and Makyjie), likening the lady to 
man's soul, the giant to Lucifer, and the knight to Christ. The 
Abbey Walk is interesting for its opening couplet — 

Alone as I went up and down 
In ane Abbaye was fair to see — 

and its possible association with the actual Dunfermline ; while it 
morals on the refrain — 

Obey and thank thy God of all — 

with a right musical and pleasant piety. The rest, except a rather 
coarse and not very clever gibe at Soi/ie Practice of Medicine, are 
mostly religious-philosophical, and the best of them is the Three 
Dead Pows, i.e. death's heads, which address man, warning him of 
his end. This is also given to Patrick Johnston. 

It is usual to rank William Dunbar as the chief of all this group, 
and in fact the greatest Scottish poet except Burns. Nor is there 
much reason for quarrelling with the estimate, since 
Dunbar, though he has perhaps nothing equal in their own 
kinds to the above-noted passages of the Testament of Creseide and 
to Robene and iMakyne, has a larger collection to show, both of good 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 



and of excellent work, a somewhat wider range, and above all, a 
certain body and fulness of poetical wine which is not so evident in 
the pensive though not uncheerful schoolmaster of Dunfermline. We 
know a little, if not very much, more about Dunbar than about Henry- 
son. He was certainly a Lothian man, probably allied not merely 
in name to the great family of the Earls of Dunbar and March, 
founded in the eleventh century by Cospatrick, and now chiefly 
subsisting in its northern or Morayshire branches. The year 1460, 
with the usual circa, is accepted as his birth-date. He went to St. 
Salvator's College, then the only one in the University of St. Andrews, 
took his B.A. in 1477, and his M.A. two years later, being, it seems, 
destined for the Church. He appears, both from his own account 
and that of others, to have been for a time a Franciscan friar, preaching 
and begging all over England and in France as well as in Scotland. 
But in the French phrase he "threw the frock to the nettles," and 
appears to have been employed by James IV. on diplomatic duty not 
merely in England, but in almost all parts of the Continent. One of 
his best and best-known poems welcomes Margaret of England on 
her coming to Scotland as the King's bride in 1503 — he was specially 
attached to her service ; and in 1508 he had some of his principal poems 
printed and published by the first Scottish printers, Chepman and 
Millar. Records of gifts and pensions to him exist up to June, 1513, 
and then we hear no more of him. Flodden came in September of 
that year, and it has been thought that he too may have fallen in the 
"dark impenetrable ring" round his master. He was certainly dead 
in 1 530, for Sir David Lyndsay says so ; but this is all we know. 

The poems known to be by, or reasonably attributed to, him are 
tolerably numerous, but not very bulky, none exceeding some 600 
lines, while most are quite short. The entire number in Dr. Small's 
edition! is loi, of which eleven are given as "attributed," while 
The Tiva scven, having been, as noted above, printed in the poet's 
'u"e7ten own lifetime as his, have a higher degree of certainty 
and the iVedo. than any of the others in text. The two most consider- 
able are The Twa Maryit IVemen and the Wedo and the Friars of 
Berwick, the latter only " attributed," but displaying a verve and an 
accomplishment of form not known to be possessed by any other Scottish 
poet of the time. Both are very strongly Chaucerian, and the Friars is 
in Chaucerian "riding-rhyme"; the other piece is perhaps the most 
accomplished specimen of that revived alliteration which has been 
previously discussed. Dunbar does not limit himself to three 
alliterations, often giving four or even five, and he is somewhat 
less distinct in his middle pause than Langland. On the other hand, 
1 For the Scottish Text Society ; also editions by D. Laing and by Dr. 
Schipper. 



CHAP. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 187 

his whole verse, which averages thirteen or fourteen syllables, has a 
distinctness and evenness of rhythm which are only found in parts 
of Piers Plow man. The matter of the poem is an ultra-Chaucerian 
satire on women. The three personages are represented as all 
young and all pretty ; they are drinking freely in a goodly garden on 
Midsummer Eve, and the poet achieves a triumiDhantly contrasted 
picture of physical beauty in scene and figure and of moral deformity 
in sentiment. The Wife of Bath, the undoubted model of these three 
young persons, is neither mealy-mouthed nor straight-laced, but she is 
always good-natured. Dunbar's wives and widow combine sensuality 
with ill-nature in a way not elsewhere to be paralleled in English 
literature till we come to the rakes of the Restoration. Yet the 
ugliness of the picture is half redeemed by the mastery with which 
Dunbar makes them expose their own shame, and sets their figures 
for us with a touch of grave irony worthy of Butler, and less purely 
caricatural in style than Hudibras. The Friars of Berwick is a 
version of a well-known fabliau, in which two friars, treated with 
scant hospitality by a woman who in her husband's absence has 
made an assignation with her lover, revenge themselves upon her 
(though not to extremity), taking advantage of the husband's 
unexpected return. It is therefore much less of an original and more 
of a commonplace than The Twa Maryit IVemen, but the story is 
told with the true brio of the Canterbury Tales themselves. 

Next to these two may be ranked the Golden Targe, the Flyting 
of Dunbar and Kennedy, the famous Datice of the Seven Deadly Sins, 
and The Thistle and the Rose. The first of these is a typical fifteenth- 
century poem, allegorical in tone and very " rhetorical " 
in language, with the usual praise of Chaucer, "Rose ^'poems!^^ 
of rhetors all," and " light of our Inglis," as well as of 
the "sugared lips and aureate tongues" of Gower and Lydgate. The 
Targe is in nine-lined stanzas ; The Thistle and the Rose, in rhyme- 
royal, is of the same stamp and style, but adjusted to convey a 
welcome full of grace, good sense, and good taste to the youthful 
Margaret, the " rose " married to the " thistle." Many who know 
nothing else of Dunbar's, know the Seven Deadly Sins from its early 
inclusion in anthologies. The vigour of its lurid pictures has not been 
exaggerated, nor the real command of metre (Romance eights and 
sixes) which the poet here as everywhere displays, and which contrasts 
so strikingly with the staggering gait and palsied grip of his English 
contemporaries. The Fly ting, one of a group of such things, is a 
curiosity no doubt, but a curiosity of a kind which could perhaps be 
spared. Literary Scots at all times, up to the eighteenth century, 
admitted, as has been said, a coarseness of actual language which is 
rarely paralleled in literary English ; and these " flytings " consisted of 



THE FIFTEENTH CENl'URY 



alternate torrents of sheer Billingsgate poured upon each other by 
the combatants. There is not much doubt that many of the strange 
terms of abuse used are mere gibberish, coined for the occasion ; but 
there was considerable legitimate accommodation in Scots for the 
purpose, and the poem, like others of its kind, is at worst a quarry for 
lexicographers. 

Of the very numerous minor poems must be mentioned the 
touching and interesting Lament for the Makers, '"when he was 
sick," with its passing-bell refrain of Timor Mortis conturbat Jiie, and 
its list of poets, most of whom are shadows of shades ; the lively if 
irreverent Ballad of Kind Kyttok, and her reception at Heaven's 
gates ; the Testament of Mr^ Andro Kennedy, a macaronic pendant to 
the Flyting-, two rhetorical pieces on the Lord Bernard Stewart, living 
and dead ; a sharp satirical descri])tion of Edinburgh Session ; a 
quaint contrast of merry Edinburgh and distressful Stirling ; the very 
vivid if not very decorous Dance in the Qneeii's Chamber, which, with 
other poems to the Queen, shows that Margaret had the full Tudor 
tolerance of broad speech ; the not unamusing Poem to ane 
Blackamoor — "My lady with the meikle lips " — apS/egress who, as 
a rarity, had been imported to be maid to the Queen. The rest are 
pious or profane, personal or general, rhetorical or direct. But they 
are nearly always out of the common way of literature of their time ; 
and the contemptuous fashion in which they have been sometimes 
spoken of is not a little surprising. 

The last of the four poets to be mentioned here is also the least, 
though he has an interest of his own. Gavin or Gawain Douglas 
was the third son of Archibald Douglas — " Bell-the-Cat " — fifth Earl of 
Angus, and of Elizabeth Boyd. It is not known at 
DoiTgbs. which of the numerous seats of the Douglasses he was 
born ; but the date must have been somewhere about 
the juncture of the years 1474-75. He matriculated at St. Andrews 
in 1489, was a "determinant" (= Bachelor Elect) in 1492, Licentiate 
or incipient Master two years later. He took orders, and at once 
obtained various preferments, the chief being the benefice of Preston- 
kirk or Linton in East Lothian ; while in 1501 he was made Dean 
or Provost of St. Giles', Edinburgh. In this same year he finished 
the Palice of Honour. Between this and the year of Flodden, 15 13, 
in the summer of which he finished his Virgil, we hear little of him. 
As readers of Scottish history know, his two elder brothers fell in the 
battle itself, which broke the heart, though it did not actually see the 
death, of Bell-the-Cat his father; while his nephew, son of the 
Master of Angus, killed at Flodden, very speedily gained the heart of 
Queen Margaret, who, thougli a widow and a mother, was not much 
more than a girl in age. By this marriage Gawain not merely 



THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 



became in the future, through the Countess of Lennox and Darnley, 
a collateral ancestor of the whole royal house of Great Britain and 
Ireland, but was brought into very immediate connection 
with the chief person in the state, the Queen Regent, 
who at once gave him the rich Abbey of Aberbrothock or Arbroath, 
and shortly afterwards the brevet-keepership, as we may say, of the 
Great Seal. But Margaret's hasty marriage to the head of a power- 
ful but dreaded house was extremely unpopular, and Gawain Douglas 
reaped from it more trouble than profit. He was never confirmed in 
Arbroath by the Pope ; an attempt of his niece by marriage to make 
him Archbishop of St. Andrews, and therefore Primate of Scotland, 
was frustrated by the address and interest at Rome of another candi- 
date ; and though Douglas, in 15 15, obtained the Bishopric of 
Dunkeld, this appointment also brought him endless trouble, and he 
was actually imprisoned by the new regent Albany for an offence 
apparently somewhat analogous to the English Praemunire, in ob- 
taining the Pope's letters without the King's, i.e. the Regent's, license. 
The Pope, however, resented this very decidedly, and as Albany's 
severities towards Queen Margaret were also attracting the dis- 
pleasure of her brother Henry VI H., Douglas was hberated, and 
after some further difficulty was consecrated to Dunkeld. He did not, 
however, enjoy it very peaceably — peaceable enjoyment of anything 
was hardly possible then in Scotland — and his death in London, 
where he was negotiating against Albany, coincided with hostile 
measures against him taken by Archbishop James Beaton, and re- 
moved him from evil to come. He died at the house of his friend 
Lord Dacre, and was buried in the Savoy. We have his will and a 
considerable number of public documents about him. 

Douglas was not an old man — forty-eight only — when he died; 
and for the last ten years of his life he had been incessantly engaged 
in public and private business. But his work in literature — no doubt 
all composed in the quiet time between his ordination and Flodden — 
is not inconsiderable. Besides what we have, we know that he 
translated some Ovid, and it is possible that he did other things. 
His existing work^ consists of the Palice of Honour, King Hart., 
and the version of the Aeneid. Critics of weight "^ have held up 
Douglas, on the strength of this Virgil, as representing, or at any rate 
anticipating, the new movement in poetry, that which incorporates the 
classical and modern tradition, and so as occupying a position at 
least historically more important than that of his more intensely and 
poetically gifted contemporary Dunbar. With all due deference, this 

1 Ed. Small, 4 vols. Edinburgh, 1874. 

2 See W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry, i. 374, one of the few 
passages in this excellent book with which 1 cannot agree. 



1 90 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

may well be deemed a mistake. Even in the selection of Ovid and 
Virgil, Douglas, though he may have been slightly further affected 
by the classical influence " in the air," did not go very much further 
than Chaucer a century and more before him. And in the manner 
of his work, both original and translated, he is not modern at all. 
He is with Hawes, even with Lydgate ; not with Wyat and Surrey. 

In order to come to a just estimate of this, though the Virgil itself 
will give us sufficient data, it is before all things necessary to con- 
sider his original poems, the Palice and King Hart. Douglas, like 
his other countrymen just mentioned, is a better manager 
"po^emT''' of "our IngHs" (it is believed that he himself first uses 
" Scots " with the national diff"erentia) than Hawes ; 
but the Palice of Honour and King Hart are in scheme and tone 
absolutely on a par with the Pastime and the Example. No later 
Renaissance sunrise-colour is on them : they are lighted only by 
the setting moon of the Rose. Indeed, neither in Hawes nor in 
Lydgate, neither in Occleve nor in the stiffer work of Dunbar, is there 
a more essentially fifteenth-century poem than the Palice of Honour. 
It has a prologue and parts ; it is written in "■ aureate " language 
of at least eigh teen-carat "rhetorical" value; it has entire stanzas 
(nine-lined ones rhymed aabaabbab') consisting of mere catalogues of 
names. The iMay morning, the stock, though no doubt quite sincere, 
classing of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, with an interesting note of 
" Dunbar yet ondeid," the vision, the heathen mythology and the 
historical characters, the bare, childlike allegory everywhere intruding 
itself, are unmistakable. Nobody who knows the Romance of the 
Rose, as Guillaume de Lorris started it nearly three hundred years 
before Douglas's death, can possibly mistake the quality. As usual 
in these poems, the story, apart from the allegory, is slender. The 
poet offends Venus (whose lusty countenance and "topaz" hair have 
been thought to be a compliment to the youthful Margaret) and is 
sentenced to a palinode and a journey round the world in company 
with the Muses. They at last reach the slippery Rock of Honour 
with its Palace at the top, are introduced to much historical and 
allegorical company, and the poem ends abniptly by one of the 
common devices for waking. The common form for this is relieved 
not merely by the singularly abundant vocabulary which distinguishes 
all these Scottish poets, but by a distinctly poetical imagination and no 
small descriptive power. 

Ki7ig Hart, the date of which is unknown, is duller. The hero 
IS simply the Heart of man ; and the poem is one of the innumerable 
allegories of Life. He has five servants — the senses; is captured by 
Dame Pleasance, liberated by Pity, captures Pleasance in turn and 
marries her, is visited by Age, deserted by his wife, etc., and at last 



CHAV. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 191 

mortally wounded by Decrepitude. It is impossible to understand 
Mr. Small's assertion that this is "' a work which in its execution is 
quite original." The stanza is the Chaucerian octave. 

Undoubtedly, however, if Douglas had left nothing but his two 
ostensibly original poems, he would not stand nearly as high in 
historical repute as he does stand. It has been said that the idea of 
him as a strictly Renaissance writer, because he translates Virgil, is 
a mistake. Douglas, it is true, was no bad scholar; he certainly 
knew Latin well, and he may have known Greek. But Virgil comes 
out of his hands as he might have come out of those of 
Chaucer, almost as he might have come out of those of 
Benoit, with the sole exception that Douglas is faithfuller. He does 
not embroider on his text. But his version of that text looks back- 
ward and not forward. He accents classical names with an entire 
indiiference to quantity. His vocabulary and phraseology are 
Romantic, not Classical. He substitutes the irregular charm of the 
Middle Ages for the exact, the impeccable, though the somewhat 
frigid, correctness of Virgil. Nor is this all. The fifteenth century, 
as we have seen, particularly affected prologues, and Douglas has 
given us a Prologue to each of the books of the Aeneid, as well as to 
the thirteenth Aeneid of Mapheus Vegius, which he also translated. 

And these prologues are, as indeed might be expected, by far the 
most interesting part of the work. The text is translated into riding- 
rhyme of very fair Chaucerian quality, and displaying Douglas's usual 
correctness of ear and his justness and colour of language. But in 
the Prologues he gives himself, as was natural and permissible, a 
much freer field. Their interest is not to be judged from the First, 
which is itself in couplets, and after a very " aureate " laudation of 
Virgil as "Chosen carbunkil" — 

Lanterne, lodesterne, mirror, and a per se — 

engages in a severe criticism, not very graceful in tone and most 
awkwardly clothed in verse, of Caxton's Aeneidos. This extends to 
several hundred lines. The Second is very short — three stanzas of 
rhyme-royal — and not very notable ; nor need much be said of the 
Third — five stanzas of nine lines each. It is not till the Fourth that 
the poet allows himself really to expatiate ; but he does so here, with 
good effect, in nearly forty " royal " stanzas on the strength of Love, 
the incommodity and remedy of the same — it has been observed that 
he translated the Retnediitm amoris, though it is lost. The very first 
stanza hits successfully that clangorous note of the rhyme-royal which 
has been observed upon, and this note is well sustained throughout. 
The Fifth, short, nine-lined, and with another fling at Caxton, is less 
notable ; and the Sixth (octaves) is chiefly noteworthy for its matter, 



192 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

a curious discussion of various poetical and philosophical accounts 
of Hell. But the Seventh and Eighth are each, in its different way, 
of very high interest indeed. The Seventh, in couplets, contains a 
vigorous description ot Winter, attractive in itself and as an instance 
of that copious and vigorous vocabulary which all these poets show, 
and curious to contrast with Thomson. The Eighth has a curiosity 
still higher ; for here Douglas indulges in that very quaint combina- 
tion of alliterative and metrical prosody which was still sometimes 
attempted at this time, and has achieved, perhaps, the most remark- 
able example of it. The stanza somewhat resembles that of Gawain 
and the Green Knight, but is regularly arranged in a form of thirteen 
lines bobbed and wheeled. The first nine are heavily alliterated, 
differing from those of The Twa Maryit IVeinen by havmg strong 
not weak endings, and rhymed ababababc ; then comes a triplet, 
rhymed, of three iambics with equivalence, and then a final line c of 
four syllables only. The vocabulary of the piece is, outside the 
" Flytings," the most crabbed and fantastic even of these Scottish 
poems, and not a few of the words can merely be guessed at. The 
tenor of the whole is satirical on the state of the world. 

The Ninth, beginning in six-lined stanzas, but soon passing into 
couplets, is still ethical in tone; and the Tenth (in five-lined stanzas) 
theological ; while the Eleventh deals with chivalry, both sacred and 
profane. The Twelfth, " ane singular lerned prolog " of the descrip- 
tion of May, again ranks among the best, and is in couplets ; ^ and 
there is a similar one on June for the egregious Vegius his work. 

It is. let it be repeated, much more on these Prologues (where he 
has evidently set his mind upon giving specimens of his powers in 
various matters and forms) than on his two long pieces that the esti- 
mate of Gawain Douglas should be based. That estimate cannot be 
of the highest, for the poet has too little detachment from the mere 
literary forms and fashions of his time, and is far too much under the 
prevalent delusion of the identity of " rhetorike " and poetry. But it 
should be relatively and by allowance high. He has in a very 
eminent degree that feeling for nature by which the poets of his 
country have ever since been honourably distinguished ; he has a 
very good mastery of metrical form, and he perhaps shows the good 
side (it must be allowed that he also shows the bad) of the " aureate " 
or rhetoriqueur language better than any poet, either in English or in 
French, of his time and school. 

1 Here is a fine passage : — 

For to behald It was a gloir to see, 
The stabylit windis and the cahnit sea, 
The soft seisoun, the firmament serene, 
The lowne illumynat air and fyrth amene. 



CHAPTER IV 



LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE 

Sir Ge?ie)jdcs, etc. — Sir Laimfal — The verse Morte Arthur — Golagros and 
Gawane and Rauf Coilyear — Malory — Lord Berners — Caxton's translated 
romances 

The difficulty in distinguishing the romances ^ of the fifteenth century 
from those of the fourteenth has been already referred to. With rare 
exceptions, it is doubtful whether we possess anything, originally of the 
fifteenth, in verse which is really of great merit. Bevis of Haniptoii, 
Guy of IVarivick, the Charlemagne stories, and the rest continued to 
be copied or rehandled ; and though it pleased Chaucer to make fun 
of the style, this does not seem to have had much effect on its popu- 
larity. In particular, the Arthurian legend, which, except in the 
Northern or Gawain division, appears not to have attracted very 
much attention in the fourteenth century, recovered, to our eternal 
advantage, much of its popularity in the fifteenth. The non- 
Arthurian romances, verse and prose, of the time are but of small 
interest. A fair example of them is Sir Getierydes, which must 
almost to a certainty have been originally French, but of which no 
French original is known, while two different English versions — one 
in octosyllabic couplets, printed by Dr. Furnivall, for the Roxburghe 
Club, and one in rhyme-royal, printed by Mr. Aldis Wright for the 
E.E.T.S. — are in existence. Sir Generydes'^ is a fair 
example of the common form of the romance of chivalry, Ctfierydes, 
but has little more (though certainly no less) individu- ^"^• 
ality than the average nineteenth-century novel. Torrent of Portugal,"' 
a shorter story of the same class, is in Sir Thopas metre ; Octoviau, 
a wicked mother-in-law story, mentioned before as possibly earlier, is, 
as printed by Weber (there is another version), in a slightly modified 

1 For the chief romance-collections, see notes, pp. 82 and 102. 

2 I use the E.E.T.S. edition. 

3 Ed. Hallivvell, London, 1842. Re-edited for the E.E.T.S. by Dr. Adam. 

o 193 



194 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

form of that stanza, rhymed aaabab. with the b lines shortened, instead 
of the usual aa long, b short, cc long, b short. 

The best romances in verse not strictly ballad-romance (see next 
chapter), and the worst, belong to the Arthurian division. At the head 
of the former we may put, despite its libel on Queen Guinevere, the 
beautiful poem of Sir Laicnfal^ adapted and much im- 
proved by Thomas Chester, who probably lived in the 
second quarter of the fifteenth century, from a poem of Marie de France, 
centuries older and not improbably metamorphosed before it came into 
Chester's hands. The discredit of making the Queen play the part 
of Potiphar's wife, of which there is no trace in the better Arthurian 
legends, is not his. But the actual story of Launfal, with his fairy 
love, his unfortunate divulging of their passion, his punishment and 
his pardon, is one of the most exquisite of all mediasval tales, and is 
quite charmingly told by Chester in the Sir Thopas metre doubled. 
The beauty of which this stanza is capable, especially in the doubled 
form, where the rhymes run aabccbddbeeb, each b line being short, 
is nowhere better shown, nor its complete freedom at its best from 
the ding-dong, sing-song monotony which beyond all doubt it often 
puts on, and which Chaucer has so wickedly immortalised. 

Not far below Launfal in poetical merit, and of the first interest 

as having almost demonstrably served as direct original to Malory 

(vide infra), is the Morte Arthur, which Dr. Furnivall 

The verse . -, ,y .1 • . .1 • c 

Morte prnited niore than thirty years ago,- a piece oi some 4000 
Arthur, lines, arranged in quatrains rhymed abab, which not 
uncommonly spread into sixains or octaves of the same arrange- 
ments. 

Lancelot of the Laik,^ a poem in heroic couplets, and in Scots or 
some other extremely nortliern dialect of English, is ascribed to the 
end of the fifteenth century, and if so, is the latest Arthurian poem 
of the genuine kind (before the legend began to be merely "trans- 
lated," as we find it in Spenser) that we possess. 

Meanwhile one of the most conscientious, but of the v'ery dullest, 
of the vast army of dull versifiers of the time had busied liimself 
with the great matter which, perhaps, at the same time, was taking 
in a sense almost final form in prose at the hands of a very different 
person. "Herry" (Henry) Lonelich, skinner, a subject of King 
Henry the Sixth, was evidently as pious as his namesake and master, 
and in his different vocation as ineffective. His Merlin is not yet 
accessible in print, save for an extract of Dr. Kolbing's.'* His Holy 
Grail has been twice printed by Dr. Furnivall,^ and is one of the 

1 Printed in Ritson's first volume. 2 London and Cambridge, 1864. 

8 Ed. Skeat, E.E.T.S. •» In his edition of Aithoiir and Merlin. 

5 For the Roxburghe Club and tlie E.E. T.S. 



CHAP. IV LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE 195 

most curious books in existence, the wonderful interest and charm of 
the matter, which might have been thought Hkely either to stir a 
translator into genius or compel him to silent despair, being ap- 
proached with a cheerful doggedness of incompetency difficult, if not 
impossible, to parallel elsewhere. Hardly any other story could 
possibly survive such a translator ; no other translator, one would hope, 
could have failed to catch fire from such a story. But except from 
his matter, which flames like the infant Havelok in the rude hands of 
Grim, there is no spark of illumination in Lonelich, who thumps out 
his couplets by the help of " sikerly " and " everidel," of " verament " 
and "echoae," in a manner well-nigh intolerable. 

In the way of alliterative romance we have to put to the credit of 
the century in all probability, or rather certainly, two very interesting 
poems in Scots, Golai^ros and Gatuane and Ranf Coilyear. ^ For 
neither of these have we MS. authority, though we know Golagros and 
that both did exist in the Asloan MS. ; and our printed ^^aufC^i^ 
Rauf Coilyear is as late as 1572. But we have an allu- year. 
sion to this same poem by Gawain Douglas as early as 1503, 
and Golagros and Gawane was published by Chepman and Millar 
among the incunabula of the Scottish press in 1508. Both are in 
the thirteen-line alliterated and rhymed stanza with wheel {v. supra, p. 
192) . Golagros and Gaivaue belongs evidently to the Cumbrian branch 
of the Arthurian legend, and presents some very close resemblances 
to the latter part of the Awntyrs of Arthur. Raiif Coilyear, on the 
other hand, belongs to the other great family, and, so far as we 
know, is the only original Charlemagne poem in English. It is one 
of the numerous and generally interesting family of the "King and the 
Tanner " class, the king's unknowing associate here being a " collier " 
i.e. charcoal-burner), and the king, as has been said, no less a 
person than Cliarlemagne. It is a very spirited poem. Nobody has 
succeeded in identifying the author of either this or Golagros; but 
it is not at all impossible that both may have one poet, and most 
probable that he lived at the end of our century, and was one of 
Dunbar's " makers." If so, he was by no means the worst of them, 
and not very far from the best, except Henryson and Dunbar himself. 

Practically nothing is known of the author of the greatest of all 
English romances, prose or verse — of one of the greatest romances of 
the world — a book which, though in mere material a compilation, and 

1 Golagros and Gaivane has been reprinted by Pinkerton in Scottish Poems, 
1792; by Laing (a great rarity) in 1827; by Madden, with other Gawaine pieces, 
in 1839 ; and by Mr. Amours in Scottish Alliterative Poems, cited above. There 
is also a German reprint. Rauf Coilyear can be found in Mr. Amours's voUime, 
in one of the volumes of the E.E.T.S., Charlemagne Romances, and also in Laing's 
several times reprinted Ancie?it and Popular Poetry of Scotland (last edited by 
Small, Edinburgh, 1885I. 



196 THE FIFFEENTH CENTURY book iv 

sometimes cleaving rather closely to its multifarious texts, is, despite 
the occasional misjudgment of unhappy criticism, a great and original 
book. Caxton, the printer {vide infra, chap, vi.) — who, instead of, 
like most early printers, giving us early editions, and mostly bad 
ones, of the classics, which were quite safe, gave us, to the infinite 
advantage of England, early models of composition in English, and 
preserved to us, in this instance at least, an English text which might 
but for him have perished — tells us that the Morte Darthiir was trans- 
lated in the ninth year of King Edward IV. (that is to say, in 1470, 
fifteen years before he himself published it) by Sir Thomas 

^ ""^^^ Malory, Knight. Caxton's follower, Wynkyn de Worde, 
in the second edition of 1496, makes the name " Maleore." Malory 
or Mallory is both a Yorkshire and a Leicestershire name, but there 
are absolutely no materials for identifying Sir Thomas ; the later 
suggestions that he was a Welsh priest, not an English knight, are 
baseless guesses, and we do not know in the very least why, when, 
or where he executed his book. What we do know, from the verse 
Mortc and from Lonelich, is that a strong revived interest in the 
Arthurian Legend came in about the middle of the century, and this 
is to all appearances one of the fruits of it.^ 

If so, it is incomparably the most precious. It is probable that, 
thougli among the laborious and respectable, but rather superfluous, 
inquiries into origins, none has yet been discovered for the 
^'Beaumains" story and for a few other things, Malory "did not 
invent much." The fifteenth century was not an inventive time, and 
there was much better work for it to do than second-rate invention. 
Then and tlien only could the mediaeval spirit, which was not quite 
dead, have been caught up and rendered for us with a still present 
familiarity, with the unconscious but unmistakable touch of magic 
wliich approaching loss reflects, and in English prose, which, unlike 
English verse, still had the bloom on it — the soon-fading beaiite du 
diable of youth and freshness. 

Criticisms have been made on Malory's manner of selecting and 
arranging his materials — criticisms which, like all unsuccessful 
exercises of the most difficult of arts, come from putting the wrong 
questions to the jury — from asking, '"Has this man done what / 
wanted him to do ?" or "Has he done it as / should have done it?" 
instead of " Has he done what he meant to do?" and "Has he done 
this well ? " Malory might perhaps, though in his time it would have 
been diiificult to get all the te.xts together, have given an intelligent 
precis of the whole Arthurian Legend, instead of which he selected his 
materials rather arbitrarily, and indulged in what looks to some 

1 The book, frequently printed up to the seventeenth century, has also been 
repeatedly reprinted in this. 



CHAP. IV LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE 197 

critics like incomprehensible divagation, and not much more com- 
prehensible suppression. He might have arranged a regular epic 
treatment of his sul:)ject, instead of which it is often difficult to say 
who is the liero, and never very easy to say what special contribution 
to the plot the occasionally inordinate episodes are making. What 
he did do consists mainly in two things, or perhaps three. He selected 
the most interesting things with an almost invariable sureness, though 
there are one or two omissions ; and he omitted the less interesting 
parts with a sureness to which there are hardly any exceptions at all. 
He grasped, and this is his great and saving merit as an author, the 
one central fact of the story — that in the combination of the Quest 
of the Graal with the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere lay the kernel 
at once and the conclusion of the whole matter. And last (his 
great and saving merit as a writer) he told his tale in a manner which 
is very nearly impeccable. 

There is one practically infallible test by which all but the dullest 
and most incompetent can be convinced of Sir Thomas's skill in this 
last direction, the comparison of his narrative of the last scenes of all 
with that in the verse Morte (VArtJuire above mentioned, which was 
in all probability his direct original, and which was certainly written 
just before his day. Take the death of Arthur itself, or the final 
interview of Lancelot and the Queen, in both ; compare them, and 
then remember that Malory has been dismissed as " a mere com- 
piler." It is possible that his art is mostly unconscious art — it is not 
much the worse for that. But it is nearly as infallible cis it is either 
unconscious or thoroughly concealed. The pictorial power, the 
musical cadence of the phrase, the steady glow of chivalrous feeling 
throughout, the noble morality (for the condemnation of Ascham and 
others is partly mere Renaissance priggishness stupidly condemning 
things mediaeval offhand, and partly Puritan prudery throwing its 
baleful shadow before), the kindliness, the sense of honour, the 
melancholy and yet never either gloomy or puling sense of the 
inevitable end — all these are eminent in it. It has been said, with 
perhaps hardly too great whimsicality, that there is only one bad thing 
about Malory — that to those who read him first he makes all other 
romances of Chivalry disappointing. But the fancy may at any rate be 
fairly retorted, for if any one is so unfortunate as to find other romances 
of chivalry disappointing, there is Malory to fall back upon. Merely 
in English prose he is a great figure, for although his medium would 
not be suitable for every purpose, it is nearly perfect for his own. 
Merely as the one great central storehouse of a famous and fertile 
story his place is sure. But apart from all these extrinsic considera- 
tions, it is surer still in the fact that he has added to literature an 
imperishable book. 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 



The second great writer or translator of Romance in prose during 
this period, John Bourchier, Lord Berners, was born a little before the 
probable date of the writing of Malory's J/iv'/d' iVArtliur in 1467 and 
was the son of Humphrey Lord Berners, who fell on the 
Yorkist side at the battle of Barnet. He may have been 
a Balliol man ; he certainly saw much both of war and diplomacy 
in the later years of Henry VH. and the earlier of his son; he was 
Chancellor of the Exchequer in 15 16, and from 1520 onwards 
Governor of Calais. It would seem that his literary work all dates 
from this last period of his life, which closed in 1533. His Froissart 
began to appear in 1523. and he also translated (though the books 
did not in some cases appear till after his death) the great romance 
of Hicon of Bordeaux^ the much inferior late Arthurian story Arthur 
of Little Britain, Guevara's Dial for Princes, a book which has been 
thought, not without some reason, to have had much influence on the 
development of Euphuism, and another Spanish allegoric-chivalrous 
romance, the Castle (originally Prison) of Love.^ In his work from 
the Spanish he appears to have used not the originals but French 
versions. 

In a late stage of writing, prose, and indeed verse, translations 
have very little interest, and are merely or mainly makeshifts for the 
use of those who cannot read the originals. In the early stages, 
especially of prose writing, their value is very different, and this con- 
stitutes the attractions of our fifteenth and early sixteenth century 
prose, borrowed as it almost always is in matter. And Lord 
Berners ranks with Malory as its most, gifted practitioner. His 
Froissart gives him the greatest opportunity, and he has availed 
himself of that opportunity to the utmost. His .style would 
not, of course, be suitable for every purpose or even for many 
purposes, but in his combination of rhetorical and " aureate " 
language with simpler forms, in his faint retention of poetic diction 
with a perfect adjustment to those needs of prose fiction or of romantic 
history which are nearer to those of poetry than is the case with any 
other division of prose,- he is certainly unsurpassed, and it may be 
doubted whether he has been equalled, though Mr. William Morris 
sometimes ran him hard. The Huon, representing a late French 
rehandling of one of the most romantic of the chansons de geste, has 

1 Not to be confounded with the very much earlier book of the same name 
translated from Bishop GrostSte's French a little before or a little after 1300, and 
edited by Dr. Weymouth for the Philological Society. This is religious, and of 
some linguistic, but very little literary, interest. As for Berners's own work, the 
Froissart \s'A.% reprinted by Utterson in 1812, and has been "reduced" and edited 
in modernised spelling, but otherwise well and faithfully, by Mr. Macaulay for the 
" Globe" Series (1895). Hiton has been edited by Mr. S. L. Lee for the E.E.T.S. 
Utterson also reprinted Arthur of LilUe Britain, but it is not common. 



CHAP. IV LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE 199 

the fault common to most such rehandlings, of long-windedness and 
surplusage ; but still it gives Berners good opportunity, and he takes 
it admirably. The part which Mr. Lee has isolated in his second 
volume as " The Story of Esclaramonde " might very well be taken 
as an introduction to this kind of romance by novices, and they are 
to be pitied if they do not go on. 

Between the Morte and the Froissart Caxton and his successors 
had made very large additions to the stock of romance in English. 
The Histories of Troy, more than ten years before the printing of 
Malory, Reynard the Fox, the Golden Legend, Paris , 

and Vienne, the Life of Charles the Great, the Four translated 
Sons of Aynion, Blanchardyn and Eglantine, Godfrey of '^o'na'ices. 
Bnlloigne, the Aeneidos, which so did vex Gawain Douglas — being 
Caxton's own contribution, a very considerable one, as most of them 
were translated as well as printed by himself. We shall speak of 
Caxton\s prose style later : here we are chiefly concerned with the 
romance substance of his work. There is little doubt that these late 
romances, ' especially the prose ones, had an immense effect on the 
first generation or two of readers of printed books, while perhaps their 
diffusion in print, as well as the fact that the versions selected for 
reproduction or translation were nearly always late and very seldom 
of the best, may have also contributed to that strange disgust with 
them which is not entirely to be accounted for by the mere pedantry, 
innocently consequent on the revived study of the classics directly, or 
by the touch of religious and Puritan dislike of romance, which soon 
supervened. At the same time, this crop of romances, and the 
attention paid to it, had also beyond all question much to do with the 
heroic enthusiasm of Elizabethan days, and with that after-glow of 
chivalry itself of which the noblest and most undying monument is 
the Faerie Queene?- 

1 Although as much room as possible has been given to the romances, far 
more would be required to do them real justice. Indeed, the division branches 
off into almost infinite subvarieties — for instance, the curious series of Visions of 
Hell and Purgatory, of which the Visions of TiDidalc (fifteenth century), ed. 
Turnbull (Edinburgh, 1843) is a good example. The minor Prose romances are, 
as a rule, of much less interest, as may be seen from the standard collection of 
them by W. J. Thoms, 2nd ed. 3 vols. London, 1858. 



CHAPTER V 

MINOR POETRY AND BALLADS 

Date of Ballads — The Nitt-broiuiie Maydc — "I sing of a maiden " — The Percy 
Folio — Graystecl 

Bad as the reputation of the fifteenth century is for poetrj- in England 
(and indeed in most countries except Italy) it will have been seen 
that there are notable individual exceptions. And a still better 
face is put upon the matter when we come to what is called minor 
poetry and especially to Ballads. 

In a history, and especially a short history, of this subject disserta- 
tions on purely speculative points are out of place, and perhaps in no case 
is this more so than in regard to the origins of Ballad literature gener- 
ally and the date of English Ballad literature in particular. 
Ballads. There may be said to be here, as generally, three main 
opinions, or groups of shaded opinion ; the first assign- 
ing a remote, and if possible even contemporary, origin to ballads that 
have any pretence of history, and as ancient a one as possil)le to 
those whicli are purely romantic ; the second postponing the date to 
comparatively, or in some cases quite, modern times ; and the third, 
which endeavours to assign not merely a general middle term but 
a particular age in which the literary sentiment, as yet not absorbed 
by a literary class, existed fluidly and at large, and found its special 
bent in ballad-making. It may be observed in passing that the 
second, while disagreeable to sentiment, is also quite contrary to 
probability, and has scarcely any direct evidence to support it. 
Between the first and third, opinion rather than demonstration must 
decide, but it is not impertinent to remark that besides the opposition 
on their surface, a very important order of difference is involved, 
which may be indicated by the question, " Are romances and early 
epics conglomerates of ballad, or are ballads disintegrations of epics 
— romance-episodes worked up into ballad form?" 

To the present writer the balance of probability, for reasons too 
numerous and intricate to be more than partially and generally stated 



MINOR POETRY AND BALLADS 



here, seems to incline to the supposition that the fifteenth century was 
the special time of ballad-production in England ; while not probability 
merely, but something like direct evidence, shows that during this time 
and the early sixteenth the romances, while they were lengthened 
in prose, underwent a pretty general process of shortening and 
modifying in verse. Among the facts pointing to these conclusions 
may be advanced the change during the fourteenth century from 
French and Latin to English as the vehicle of avowedly political 
poems dealing with the events of the day, and therefore dated ; the 
famous ballad of Chevy Chase, the oldest of its class, if not of all our 
ballads, which in its primitive form certainly dates within a decade 
or so of the battle of Otterburn itself; the general language and 
colour of the ballads, which is scarcely ever of a tone more archaic 
than that of 1400 ; and lastly, the testimony of the famous Percy 
Folio, the most important single collection of antique ballads that we 
have. It is known that, as far as actual writing goes, the folio is not 
older than the middle of the seventeenth century, and that some of 
the texts contained in it are not older than that date. But the 
majority are very much older, and yet pretty certainly not older than 
the fifteenth. In the balladised versions which this MS. contains of 
romances like Sir Lauiifal, Sir Degare, and a dozen others, which are 
pretty certainly of fifteenth or early sixteenth century date, we get 
not merely interesting direct evidence of the process which the 
romances themselves were at this time undergoing, but inevitable 
collateral suggestions of the ballad influence, which beyond all 
reasonable doubt was creating as well as reshaping. Like the oldest 
of our ballads, the oldest of our carols also date from this time ; and 
while in England proper formal poetry of substance is undoubtedly 
at a lower level than previously, regular as well as irregular lyric is 
at a distinctly higher. Except Alison and the best of its companions, 
there is indeed nothing so good in this division of English literature 
before the fifteenth century as the two best things of that century's 
own, while it has others not inferior. 

These two best things, both anonymous, are the famous ballad 
of the Niit-browtie Mayde, and the less famous, but not less exquisite 
carol of Our Lady, beginning " I sing of a maiden." For the first 
of these we have a much earlier authority than Percy, xh aa z 
indeed, as is generally known, it was modernised by browne 
Prior long before the publication of the Reliques, and had Mayde. 
actually been reprinted critically in a very remarkable work, the 
Prolusions of Capell, the Shakesperian scholar, in 1760. It appeared 
first in Arnold's Chronicle, a book published at Antwerp in 1502. 
It cannot be necessary to say very much about so well known a 
thing ; yet it has as a rule been rather under- than over-praised. 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 



The ring and swing of the metre, of which no previous example 
seems to exist, and which argues very considerable development of 
the language, the felicity of the alternate refrain, the singular skill 
with which the variations of equivalent feet, disyllabic and trisyllabic, 
is managed so as to prevent monotony, and the adaptation of the 
whole to the sentiment, imagery, and incident, are not less remark- 
able than the tenderness and sweetness, never in the least mawkish, 
of that sentiment itself, the dramatic management of the story, and 
the modest cogency of the moral. The piece is, as its own time 
would have said, a very " margarite " of English verse for that time, 
and indeed a pearl of poetry for ever. 

Nor is the shorter, simpler, and far less known carol ^ inferior in 
charm ; indeed, in the quality properly called e.xquisiteness it is 

even superior. The best of the Caroline poets, our 
maidln/'^ chief masters in this quality, would have been in danger 

of over-elaborating it, or of faintly ''smirching" the 
ineffable grace of the lines — 

He came also still 

Where his mother was, 
As dew in April 

That falleth on the grass. 

He came also still 

To his mother's bower, 
As dew in April 

That falleth on the flower. 

He came also still 

Where his mother lay, 
As dew in April 

That falleth on the spray. 

In no previous verse had this ^olian music — this " harp of Ariel " 
that distinguishes English at its very best in this direction, alike 
from the fuller but less unearthly harmonies of Proven9al, Italian, and 
Spanish, from the sharper sound of French, and from the less elfish 
though still fairy sound of German — been given to the world. 

If there is nothing else quite equal to these things, there is not 
a little which comes fairly near them. We may with advantage 
compare the older part of the Percy Folio both with some other 
English things and with some minor and anonymous Scottish 
poetry of the time. A complete detailed analysis, even in the most 

1 First printed by Wright for the short-lived Warton Club in 1855 (p. 30 of A 
Collection of Carols) ; reprinted by Mr. Bullen in his Carols and Poems (London, 
1886). 



CHAP. V MINOR POETRY AND BALLADS 203 

compressed form, of the contents of the " Manuscript " ^ is impossible 
here ; but some remarks on the most important groups, and a few 
individuals among those of its contents which certainly 

• The 

or probably date from the period with which we are now percy Folio, 
dealing, can hardly be without value. It contains, in 
the first place, a group of Robin Hood Ballads, which, of course, 
share in the general uncertainty pertaining to all notices of that cele- 
brated person or eidolon. It is possible that some of these are in the 
oldest form as old as the fourteenth century, but probable that most 
of them date from our time. In the second place, we have a large 
group of broken-up, modernised, and, it must be added, for the most 
part vulgarised, Arthurian ballads or short romances : — King Arthur 
and the King of Cornwal, Sir Lancelot of Dnlake, The Turk and 
Gowiti (Gawaine), The Marriage of Sir Gaivain (the famous tale of 
the Loathly Lady), Sir Lajnbivell (Launfal), Merlin^ Arthur''s Death, 
The Green Knight. Closely connected with these is a still larger 
group, in which the same process has been applied to miscellaneous 
romances of adventure, some of which we possess in longer forms 
and some of which stand alone in the shorter. Such are Sir Cauline 
(one of the finest), Sir Degree (Sir Degare), Sir Triatnore, Sir 
Eglamonr, Guy and Atnarant, Gny and Colebra)id, John the Reeve., 
and others. Another and extremely important class consists of the 
Historical Ballads, of which, as it happens, very importantly, the great 
majority concern the fifteenth and early sixteenth century : — The 
Siege of Rouen (Henry V.'s), The Murder of the Princes, The Rose of 
England, Boswortli Field, Lady Bessie, Sir Atidreiv Barton, Flodden 
Field, Scottish Field, Musselborongh Field (Pinkie), and others. 
Lastly, there are the more romantic ballads, such as the Heir of Lynne, 
the Niit-browne Mayde itself, and many more, which gave Percy's book, 
extracted from this folio, its main charm. 

An interesting and not unfairly representative specimen of the 
contents of this invaluable collection is the once extremely popular 
romance of Sir Eger, Sir Grime (Graeme?), and Sir Gray steel, 
which, till the contents of the MS. were made public, 
had only been known from a printed and w.atered-down ^ y^ ^ ■ 
eighteenth-century version abstracted by Ellis. The piece is prob- 
ably not very early — we hear nothing of it before the end of the 
fifteenth century — but it is most likely one, and a happy one. of 
those instances whereof several have been noted in the last chapter 
and in this, in which the fifteenth century gathered up and reshaped 
for the last time the best traits of the earlier romance. Winglaine, 
the Belle Dame Sans Merci ; her opposite the Lady Loosepain (not 

1 Ed. Hales and Furnivall, 3 vols, and supplement, London, 1867. 



204 THE FIl-TEENTH CENTURY book iv 

such a pretty name as Nepenthe, but not different in meaning), all 
graciousness and grace ; the well-meaning but rather venturous than 
strong Sir Eger ; his faithful friend Sir Grime; the mysterious 
Graysteel in his Forbidden Country — all these make an excellent 
tale told in some fifteen hundred couplet verses, with no great 
poetical accomplishment (indeed, most of the Folio texts are 
degraded by centuries of careless and tasteless copying), but by no 
means ill. 

It is only by reading and re-reading (a very pleasing task) such 
books as this edition of the Percy Folio, as Laing's above cited 
Ancient and Popular Poetry of Scotland, as Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's 
Early Popular Poetry, as the (also above cited) works of Utterson and 
Hartshorne, and as Mr. Wright's Collections of Political Poetry for the 
" Rolls Series," and his Carols for the Percy and Warton Societies,^ 
that the general character and substance of fifteenth-century and 
early sixteenth-century poetry can be properly appreciated. Even after 
these gleanings, pretty abundant but frequently duplicated, there is 
probably not a little still in MS. ; yet what we have suffices. We 
see in it only occasional evidence of very distinct poetic gift, and 
still seldomer much command of accomplished poetic form ; but we 
also see that vernacular verse was thoroughly established by this 
time, that there was a popular taste for it, if a rough, uncultivated, and 
easily satisfied one ; and that it was being applied to all sorts of 
subjects in all sorts of spirits. In other words, the soil was being 
well stirred and the seeds were being plentifully and widely scattered. 
It did no harm that some time was to pass before anjthing more than 
a wilding harvest came.'^ 

1 See also J. A. Fullei-Maitland, F.ii_i,'lish Carols of the Fifteenth Centurv 
(London, n.d.). 

2 The Ballads, after much piecemeal editing for a hundred years, have at 
last been put in a standard edition by the late Professor Child's monumental col- 
lection. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols, in 10 parts, Boston 
(Mass.) and London, 1882-98. 



I 



CHAPTER VI 

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 

Importance of fifteenth-century prose — Pecock — His style and vocabulary — 
Fortescue, Capgrave, Fabyan — Caxton — Fisher — His advances in style — 
More — • Latimer — Coverdale — Cranmer 

The prose of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century — or, in other 
words, the prose from Fortescue to Fisher — supplies, with the almost 
sole exception of the work of Malory and Berners, which has been 
treated above, little or nothino; that is delectable to the , 

« Importance 

mere literary consumer. But to the student of literary of fifteenth- 
history it is one of the most important periods of the ""'""^ p''°=^*'- 
whole subject. It is, in fact, the great exercising-ground — the great 
school-time — of English prose: the period in which the nearly 
unconscious experiments of Chaucer and Wyclif and Mandeville 
were expanded and multiplied, sometimes with an almost conscious 
purpose of developing prose style, and always with the practical 
effect of so doing, by writers in the most widely-diverging branches 
of literature — history and law, political and ecclesiastical controversy, 
sermons, letters, philosophy of a sort. 

Reginald Pecock, Bishop of St. Asaph and Chichester, and author, 
among much other work, Latin and English, of the Repressor of Over 
Much Blaming of the Clergy,^ is an interesting person from more 
points of view than one. His very life was dramatic 
enough, and moralled the favourite moral of the century 
— the effects of the Wheel of Fortune — with singular force. As is 
usual with men of his time, we know neither his birthplace nor his 
birth-date ; but the former was probably Wales, and the latter pretty 
certainly the end of the fourteenth century. He went to Oxford 
and became Fellow of Oriel in 141 7, soon afterwards taking orders. 
There was no dispute about his erudition. In 1431 he was made 
Master of Whittington College, London, and thirteen years later 

1 Ed. Babington, " Rolls Series," 2 vols. London, i860. 
205 



2o6 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

appointed to the bishopric of St. Asapli. Up to this time, when we 
may suppose him to have been about fifty, all things had gone 
smoothly with him. But he was soon to experience the reverse of 
the wheel, which came about in a manner not entirely clear, and 
probably due as much to the violent party politics of the time as to 
his personal faults. ^ It is, moreover, evident tliat Pecock, both in 
sermons and in his works, adopted that most perilous of all courses, 
the attempt to justify orthodoxy and authority by paradoxical and 
irregular kinds of reasoning. He met the complaints against the 
bishops by preaching at St. PauPs Cross that bishops were not bound 
to preach ; and the Repressor attacks Lollardy with arguments which 
his enemies either seriously thought, or atifected for their own ends to 
think, as heretical as the views he combated. He had been befriended 
by the good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, but after Gloucester's 
murder he seems to have made friends with Margaret and Suffolk, 
and obtained, in 1550, his translation to Chichester. Suffolk was 
extremely unpopular, but as Pecock was not arraigned for heresy for 
seven years to come, it seems excessive to connect his fall with the 
favourite. However, it was distinct enougli when it came, whatever 
the cause. He was accused of treating authority disrespectfully in 
his works, as well as of heresy in setting up reason (though on the 
orthodox side) as the criterion of religious truth. He was condemned, 
had the choice of recantation or the secular arm, recanted abjectly, 
handing his books to the executioner to burn, resigned or was deprived 
of his bishopric, and probably spent the short remainder of his life in 
strict confinement at Thorney Abbey. 

The extreme importance of Pecock's position in the history of 
English prose — a position which, from its original and representative 
character, will save us much repetition if it be dwelt on here — consists 

mainly in two points : the effect upon style which the 
vocablifary.'^ purpose of his books enabled, or ratlier obliged, him to 

attempt and partly produce, and his vocabulary. As 
regards the first point, it must be remembered that, though there may 
have been gross ignorance and intellectual sloth among the lower 
friars and monks, the educated and academic clergy of the fifteenth 
century were, with certain allowances, trained with much greater 
intellectual keenness and severity than any class of men at the 
present day, the much sneered-at scholastic discipline providing and 
enforcing an intellectual askesis to which there is no modern parallel. 
But all this training went on in Latin, and the problem was how to 
conduct a dispute on the same lines in English. Wyclif had been 

1 He had, however, excited the most violent personal and religious antipathy. 
Gascoigiie's Liber Vcritatuni {vide supra, p. 117) is permeated with a sort of refrain 
of execration of" Reginaldus Pecok. Wallicus origine, episcopus Assavensis." 



I 



CHAP. VI MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 207 

an adept in scholastic argument, but when he had occasion to 
employ it he had mostly used Latin, and his English works were 
mainly, though not entirely, addressed to the vulgar. The lapse of 
more than half a century had made it not merely possible, but desir- 
able, to change the general venue from Latin to English, and to 
address clergy and laity at once. It is very probable that this 
divulgence helped to irritate Pecock's enemies against him : but that 
is beside our present point, which is that, having undertaken to 
conduct arguments of scholastic theology in the vernacular, he had 
to adapt that vernacular itself to the strictly accurate thought, and 
the precise terminology, required by scholastic habits. He did not 
entirely succeed, but he succeeded in a degree really surprising, and 
one which could not but enlarge the powers of English correspond- 
ingly. Beside the mere narrative of Mandeville and Trevisa, the 
popular scientific exposition of Chaucer's Astrolabe, and the popular 
invective ( for it is often liitle more) of the average Wyclifian tract, 
there now took its place downright argument in English, the setting 
forth in vernacular dress of the long-proved technicalities and 
terminologies of the schools in a tongue understanded of the people. 

The vocabulary which Pecock adopted or invented for this 
purpose has special interest. It is on the one side necessarily more 
technical than Chaucer's, and on the other hand it is deliberately 
more archaic and vernacular. In particular, we see in it abundant 
examples of a process of thoroughgoing •' Teutonification " of Latin, 
Romance, and even Greek forms, which would have almost satisfied 
the champions of "ungothroughsomeness" for "impenetrability " in 
our own times. Pecock has " about-writing " for •' circumscription " of 
a coin; "aforebar" and "beforebar" for "prevent"; "alight" not 
in the modern sense, but = " alleviate " ; " apropre " for " appropriate " 
(an instance of a general tendency of his to cut off Latin sufiixes) ; 
" beholdable," an audacious Anglicising of " theoretic " ; " closingly " 
for " inclusively " ; " customable " for " habitual " ; " endly " for 
" finally " ; nay, he even retains the old English " undeadly " for 
" immortal." And that these and a vast number of other vernacu- 
larities were deliberate is shown by the fact that he has no horror of 
foreign terms as such, where he cannot get a vernacular form, though 
when he can find or make the latter he always prefers it. In fact, 
though this compound of forms that never took permanent place in 
the language, with archaisms on the one hand, and Latinisms on 
the other, makes Pecock's pages look very harsh and obscure, it is 
clear that his scheme was a possible one ; that it actually did 
exercise English in form, and enrich it in matter, to no small degree ; 
and that, though the classical reaction of the Renaissance prevented 
much of his vocabulary from receiving final letters of naturalisation, 



2o8 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

a good deal more than has actually been naturalised might have 
been admitted with no disadvantage. 

No other of the early fifteenth-century prose writers — i.e. those 

born certainly or probably within the verge of the fourteenth, or but 

a little later — equals Pecock in original and representative character, 

F rtescue ^^ Malory in charm. But John Capgrave and Sir John 

Capgrave, Fortescue, at least, deserve to keep here their traditional 

^ ^^"' places, if only because each admitted a new subject — 
law in the one case, original history in the other — to the liberty of 
English prose. Fortescue, whose not certain birth and death dates 
are usually given as 1394 and 1474, was a member of the famous 
western family of his name, an Oxford man, a lawyer, and in 1442 
Chief-Justice of the King's Bench. He was a Lancastrian through- 
out the war; but after Tewkesbury rallied to Edward IV., though he 
had to make a distinctly ignominious recantation in print. Of his 
very numerous works, some of which are i» Latin, the most important 
in English is the rather well-known Gover}iance of England, one 
passage of which, the famous contrast between the unnily indepen- 
dence of the Englishman and the slavish cowardice of France, is 
equally notable and characteristic. Capgrave, born in 1393 at Lynn, 
died in 1464. He was a monk, and wrote most voluminously in both 
languages. His Chronicle of Engla?id is his main title to admission 
here. No two styles could well be more different than his and 
Pecock's, the former being not indeed incorrect, but devoid of 
character, singularly free from archaic obscurity and archaic relish 
alike, suited fairly for plain business-like narration, but hardly 
for anything else, and on the whole more like IVIandeville, with the 
zest and poetic quality taken out, but the short simply-linked 
sentences remaining, than like any other of his predecessors. Allow- 
ing for the advance of some fifty years, the style of the next historian 
of note, Robert Fabyan, who represents the second half of the 
century as the Prior of Lynn does the first, is not unlike Capgrave's.^ 

The importance of Caxton in English prose was by no means 

merely ministerial, merelv limited to the fact that he was the 

introducer of Malory's immortal book, and of a little other good 

matter to the En<jlish reading public, or that he was the 

Caxton. . . . '% , * ' ^ . . 

first practitioner of the great art of printing among us- 
For very much of his extensive work was not merely printed, but 
written by himself; and though it is perfectly true that the matter 
was, save in an infinitesimal degree, translated, yet that in the circum- 

1 Foitescue's chief work has been edited by C. Plummer, 1885; his whole 
works by Lord Clermont. Capgrave's Clufliiicle is in the " Rolls Series," ed. 
Hingeston (1858) ; his long verse St. Katharine has been given by the E.E.T.S. 
The standard edition of Fabyan is Sir Henry Ellis's in 1811. 



CHAP. \i MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 209 

stances, as was pointed out before, does not diminish his claims. It 
was impossible for any one of intelligence to render Latin or French 
into English without exercising the youthful language in the airs, 
the graces, the crafts of its elder. There is no more interesting 
passage of its kind than that where Caxton, in the prologue to the 
Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, tells us how " I, having no great 
charge of occupation, took a French book and read therein many 
strange and marvellous histories, wherein I had great pleasure and 
deliglit, as well for the novelty of the same as for the fair language 
of French, which was in prose so well and compendiously set and 
written, that niethoiight I understood the seidcnce and sjibstance of 
every matter.'''' One sees at once the sentiment and the aim not of 
Caxton merely, but of a dozen and a hundred known and unknown 
translators of French and Latin in these early days, seeing " the 
fair language of French," or the grave and stately language of Latin, 
reflecting how destitute English, at least in prose (for they had no 
doubt about their Chaucer, even if they did a little unadvisedly couple 
Cower and Lydgate with him), was of such fairness, such gravity, 
such stateliness, and determining, so far as in them lay, to give readers 
in the vernacular not merely the bare matter, but the matter with 
some art. Nor is Caxton himself to be by any means lightly spoken 
of for accomplishment in this respect. He tells us here and else- 
where of his difficulties in adjusting his broad and rude Kentish 
dialect (we know that Kent, near as it was to London, was up to the 
fourteenth century certainly farther from a literary dialect than 
Northumbria itself), how he tried to make a prose style that should 
do for prose something not too far below what Chaucer had done 
for verse. To a very great extent he succeeded, though he some- 
times exceeded in the direction of literalness. Take him with 
Pecock, who was probably not twenty years his senior, and we see 
that his form, if not quite so interesting to the historian, is far more 
adapted for general literature ; take him with Maloiy, who was 
probably of his own age, and we find from a different point of 
comparison the same result. It is clear that Caxton was in at least 
two senses a man of letters, that he had the secret of literary crafts- 
manship. 

The middle third of the fifteenth century appears to have been 
less fruitful in the birth-dates of persons important in literature than 
any period of equal length for the last six hundred years at least. 
Indeed, between Caxton, who was probably born about 14 15, and 
Fisher, who was (again probably) born just about half a century 
later, it would not appear that a single writer of the slightest importance 
in the history of English prose first drew in English air. But the 
last thirty or thirty-five years of the century did something to 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 



clear away the reproach with Lord Berners (1467-1532), Fisher 
himself (1465-1535), Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Sir Thomas 
Elyot ( 1 488-1 546), and the early controversialists and Biblical trans- 
lators of the Reformation, among whom, from the point of view of 
prose, Cranmer probably and Latimer certainly take the first rank. 
Of Berners we have spoken ; the others must have some notice 
here. 

Justice to Fisher's character as a man, an ecclesiastic, and (with 
allowances for a certain want of strength) a politician has been done 
for a long time ; indeed, even at the times when anti- '' Popish " feeling 
ran highest in England, his fidelity to honour and con- 
science, and his hapless fate, had preserved him from 
obloquy. But it was not till the republication of his English works by 
Mr. Mayor for the E.E.T.S.^ that it was possible for justice to be 
generally done to his position in the history of prose. He was a 
.Yorkshireman, was born at Beverley, and was educated at Cambridge, 
where, through his connection with Lady Margaret, the mother of 
Henry VII., he had much to do with the founding of Christ's and 
St. John's Colleges. His patroness made him her confessor in 1502, 
the next year he became the first incumbent of her professorship of 
divinity, while in another twelvemonth he was made Bishop of 
Rochester and Chancellor of his University. For many years he 
was an active bishop, a great friend to the new classical learning, and a 
persona grata at the courts both of Henry VII. and his son. The 
affair of the divorce alarmed his conscience, and he seems to have been 
the dupe of the " Maid of Kent " ; while his election to the Cardinalate, 
after he had been imprisoned for treason, so irritated the passionate 
king that he beheaded Fislier as a practical repartee. 

Fisher's English works as yet published consist of a long Trea- 
tise, practically made up of Sermons, on the Penitential Psalms, 
a funeral Sermon on Henry VII., another on Lady Margaret, a 
third against Luther, and a fourth preached on Good 
^Tn^^tyk."^ Friday, with two little tractates written in prison, a 
Spiritual Consolation to his sister Elizabeth, and the 
Ways to Perfect Religion. Thus almost the whole of his work is 
oratorical at least in profession. But this matters little, for the 
whole literature of the time was so saturated with the idea of 
"rhetoric" that everything took more or less the rhetorical if not 
oratorical turn. And Fisher's rhetoric never has the very least touch of 
the impromptu about it. On the contrary, he is one of the very earliest 

1 1876. Good judges had, however, ahvays appreciated Fisher, and he duly 
figures in the remarkable Specimens of Prose Writers (3 vols. London, 1807) to 
which George Burnett gave his name, but of wliich Burnett's friend, comrade at 
Balliol, and fellow-" Pantisocrat," Southey, was the real inspirer. 



MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 



English writers in whom we can discern the dehberate selection and 
practice of certain means and methods wholly to achieve style. He 
has g(jt beyond the painful effort of Pecock to forge a vocabulary 
and arrange a syntax capable of conveying the effects of Latin 
argument in the vernacular. He is not, like Caxton, endeavouring 
dimly to get in English results (what, he does not quite understand) 
as pleasant as those of French. He has already discovered, and 
deliberately experiments for, rhetorical effect with the peculiar resources 
provided by the double dictionary — Teutonic and Romance — of 
English, as well as by the more general devices of cadence, parallelism, 
and the usual figures of speech. The simple but extraordinarily 
effective plan of coupling a " Saxon " and a Latin word, which is so 
noticeable in the Authorised Version of the Bible, and which may 
have arisen before the rhetorical advantage of it was perceived, from 
the mere convenience of addressing one term to "lered" and the 
other to " lewed " folk, appear in him constantly. '' Wood " [mad] 
and "cruel," " horrible " and •' fearful," " bruckle " [brittle] and " frail," 
"end" and "conclusion," and a thousand more stud his pages. 
Further, he has discovered the effectiveness — more dangerous and 
morejikely to surfeit — of the triplet — "fasting, crying, and coming to 
the choir," " worldly honours, worldly riches, and fleshly pleasures." 
Inversion, a device so naturally suggested by the different order of 
Greek, Latin, and English, has no secrets for him, and, as inversion 
always does, suggests cadence. He is aware of the assistance given 
in colouring and varying prose effect by the admixture of long and 
short sentences; and it is scarcely too much to say that we find in 
him, and for the first time, examples of the rhetorical, as well as of the 
logical, construction and use of the paragraph. Side by side with his 
classical grace he has something of the vernacularity of Latimer, and 
he makes use of the quaint mystical and allegoric comparisons, which 
the Middle Ages elaborated from Scriptural and patristic use, with a 
felicity which occasionally does not come much short of that of the 
greatest rhetoricians of the seventeenth century. In fact, were it 
not for the spelling and for the obligatory Latin quotations, he is 
altogether wonderfully in advance of his time. 

Fisher's great companion in misfortune, Sir Thomas More, holds 
a less distinguished position in the strict history of strictly English 
literature than is generally thought. His famous Utopia was never 
Englislied by himself at all, nor by others till some 
time after his death. It is therefore quite preposterous 
to quote it under his name as belonging to English prose ; we 
might as well include Homer, Froissart, and Machiavelli as English 
writers. His exte^^sive polemical writing is not remarkable in 
style, and is spoilt by the violence which pervaded both sides in 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 



Reformation controversy. To speak of him, therefore, as " the Father 
of English prose " is to apply a silly phrase in a fashion monstrously 
unhistorical. Even the History of Ricluird III., which is his chief 
claim, and (if his) a sound one, to a place in the story of style, has 
been much overpraised. Tlie eulogies of critics like Hallam were 
probably determined by the fact that it is an early and not unhappy 
example of the rather colourless "classical" prose, of which a little 
later we shall find the chief exponents to be Ascham and his friends 
at Cambridge. It is, of course, a good deal better than Capgrave, and 
it is free from Pecock's harshness and crudity of phrase. But as it 
cannot on the one hand compare for richness, colour, and repre- 
sentative effect with the style of Berners, one of the two best writers 
of prose nearly contemporary with More, so it is not to be men- 
tioned with that of Fisher, the other, for nice rhetorical artifice 
and intelligent employment of craftsman-like methods of work. But 
it is much more '' eighteenth century " than either, and this com- 
mended it to Hallam ; while More's pleasant wit and great intellectual 
ability naturally set it above the work of mere translators or com- 
pilers. Sir Thomas has a secure place in English history, and no 
mean one in that very interesting history of works of distinction com- 
posed in Latin, since the arrival of the vernaculars at years of discre- 
tion, which has yet to be written. But his place in the strict History 
of English literature is very small, and not extraordinarily high. 

As Fisher occupies the most commanding position among the 

divines of the time in reference to original and skilful handling of 

English style, so the opposite side furnished the most remarkable 

and successful examples of what could be done by 

.atimer. (.^rrying out his principles. Tyndale, the next com- 
petent translator of the Bible to Wyclif, is more noteworthy for his 
-hapless fate and for a vigorous controversial pen, than for distinct 
literary merit ; but Latimer, Coverdale, and Cranmer must be better 
spoken of. Hugh Latimer ^ indeed — who was born in 1489 of a 
family of Leicestershire yeomen, was educated at Clare Hall, Cam- 
bridge, became Bishop of Worcester in 1539, and was burnt in 
1555 at Oxford — holds a very important aud somewhat peculiar 
position, ranking with Bunyan, Cobbett, and in a lesser degree Defoe, 
as the chief practitioner of a perfectly homely and vernacular style. 
Such a style naturally connects itself with an intense egotism ; and 
Latimer is as egotistic, though not as arrogant, as Cobbett himself. 
He was a thoroughly honest and a thoroughly practical man, no 
partisan in the bad sense (that is to say, in the way of winking at 
practices by friends which he would have stormed against in foes), 

1 Latimer is well presented in two little volumes of Mr. Arber's invaluable 
reprints. The Ploug/iers and Seven Sermons. 



CHAP. VI MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 213 

with all the taste of the common people for vivid homely illustration, 
and sometimes, as in tlie universally known description of the paternal 
household, capable of extraordinarily graphic presentment of fact. 
Beyond the range of personal description and shrewd, .unadorned 
argument or denunciation his literary gifts would probably not have 
extended in any case very far. But as a popular sermon-writer in 
his own days, or as a popular journalist in these, he had in tne one 
case, and could have had in the other, but very few rivals and no 
superiors. Nor is it improper to notice that his raciness and 
vernacularity were specially useful as correctives of the rather 
monotonous correctness which the imitation of Ciceronianism in 
English was likely to bring in. 

The merits of Coverdale and Cranmer are rather matters of 
imputation and lending than of certain attribution by right, the claims 
of the one resting on his supposed principal share of the merits of 
the early Tudor translations of the Bible, those of the other partly on 
this, but still more on his reputed authorship of a large part of the 
Edwardian Liturgy. Miles Coverdale, who was born in 
Yorkshire about 1488, and educated at Cambridge, 
became a Protestant exile on the Continent, and was busy on more 
versions than one of the Scriptures, chiefly in the fourth decade of 
the sixteenth century. He became Bishop of Exeter in 1551, and 
though he suffered imprisonment in the Marian persecution, was not 
restored later, dying in 1569 as merely an incumbent. If (which 
does not seem to be absolutely certain) he was the actual translator 
of the Bible of 1535 which goes by his name, there is no doubt that 
some of the best phrasing, for sound and sense, of the great Authorised 
Version is originally due to him. His prologue and other editorial 
matter certainly seems to contain not a little of the peculiar music 
which has always been associated with the English Bible, and which 
the revisers of a few years ago showed such extraordinary ability in 
removing whenever they had an opportunity. It must, however, be 
said that even for this quality there are advocates of Tyndale's claims 
in opposition to Coverdale. 

The praise claimed for Cranmer — that of being the chief author 
of the Collects and Prayers of the Anglican Liturgy — is even higher, 
inasmuch as the matter, though necessarily showing common 
forms of phrase and common stocks of matter, is more 
original. Cranmer was born in Nottinghamshire in '■=»""^'=''- 
1489, became a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, took a great 
(at least large) part in the affair of the divorce, and without holding 
any bishop's see previously, was appointed direct to the Primacy at 
Warham's death in 1532. He was burnt at Oxford in 1556. His 
character as a man does not concern us. But it is only fair to say 



214 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv 

that the considerable body of his doctrinal and controversial works 
displays, as far as the matter will admit, a command of melodious 
word-arrangement not much inferior to that which is to be found 
passim in the Liturgy. The trutii seems to be that this peculiar 
style — the swan-song of Middle English transferred from verse to 
prose — was less the property of any individual man than abroad in 
the air at the time ; and that it found utterance whenever fit voice 
and fit matter came together, from Malory to Cranmer and from 
Berners to Coverdale. Hardly ever afterwards could the touch of 
archaism be attained without deliberate pastiche ; never before could 
the writers boast the possession of a full vocabulary and a tolerably 
exercised practice. The rude vulgarity of partisan controversy, the 
learned dulness of argumentative exposition, often mar this music ; 
but where, as in the Prayer-book, the matter indited is of the best, 
then the style is of the best likewise — of such a best as was never 
again to be naturally produced, and hardly ever to be imitated by the 
most loving and delicate art. 



INTERCHAPTER IV 

The general lessons of the fifteenth century ' are rather unusually easy 
to disentangle ; indeed, the very want of intrinsic, and so misleading, 
interest leaves these lessons all the more exposed. 

In poetry we have little or no progress to chronicle, and a sur- 
prisingly small amount of positive achievement, this latter being 
found almost wholly in the small group of the better Scottish poets 
and in the anonymous writers of ballads and carols. Negatively 
the century may be said to have done at least one very good thing — 
to have shown by the repeated practice of persons, sometimes pos- 
sessed of actual genius, tliat the revived alliterative schemes, even 
crutched and bolstered with rhyme and stanza arrangement, would 
not do. Also, in pursuing another branch of the same jjoetic maze 
of "passages that lead to nothing," it may be said to have shown 
very clearly the danger of a too stiff and elaborate poetic diction. 
Otherwise its poetical practice, in the higher and more regular poetic 
kinds, was a rather touching, but for the most part hopelessly unsuc- 
cessful, attempt to make one good custom corrupt the world, to 
continue Chaucerian form and Lorrisian matter long after the latter 
had lost any real connection with poetic power, and without the gifts 
of language, of humour, of study of nature and humanity, which had 
given value to the former. 

Yet there had more than possibly arisen during this very time — 
there had to a certainty come into far more extensive use than ever 
before, a kind of popular and only half-literary poetry, which was 
gradually to supply solvents for this stiffness, breath and life for this 
lack of inspiration, to stir the blood of the great new literary poets of 
the next age like a trumpet, to give Shakespeare himself scraps 
worth decking his own fabric with, models for liis own unapproach- 
able and inestimable lyrics, and last, but far indeed from least, by 
the very irregularity of its apparently artless art, to maintain and to 

1 As ill the case of Middle English, there is no single book to which the 
student can be referred for this period ; and as there, Morley, Ten Brink, and the 
latest Warton do not completely supply the want. 

215 



21 6 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book 

extend that sort of liberty which is the glory and the essence of 
English poetry. It is a curious thing that this liberty has been, 
throughout our liistory, in much more danger than the political 
freedom which has occupied historians at such length, simply because 
the attempts on it have been made not by tyrants from without but 
by mistaken persons from within. Even now there are folk who will 
not face the plain fact that Chaucer allowed himself trisyllabic feet, 
but try to get him into the hard and fast dungeon of the decasyllable 
by slurs and elisions and all manner of unnatural tricks. His own 
immediate successors no doubt tried to tell their syllables as exactly 
as they told their beads. But the blessed liberty of the ballad was 
beside them all the time, and served as an alternative to and a pro- 
test against their theory. 

Very closely connected with this matter is the already noted 
change of pronunciation Avhich certainly went on throughout the 
century, though we are in the profoundest ignorance of its details, 
and can only dimly appreciate its results in the new verse of Surrey 
and Wyat afterwards. A good deal, no doubt, was due to the in- 
creasing disuse and at last total abolition of the final e, with the con- 
sequent substitution of plurals in s for es and the like, the dropping 
of the infinitive en, and all the rest of it. For it must be (though it 
is not always) remembered that a process of this kind is a very far- 
reaching one. You cannot merely cut a syllable off a word and 
leave the sound-value of the rest as it was. The lopping and 
topping, in at least some cases, must affect the balance of the word, 
shift its centre of gravity, alter its relations to other words in the 
verse or the sentence. The strange tricks played, for instance, by 
Wyat with the syllable eth, and his apparent belief in the propriety 
of rhyming it by itself, without any regard to what comes before, 
must have ultimate reasons of this sort, though we may, even as in a 
glass darkly, have difficulty in seeing what they were. So, too, the 
increasing isolation of the country and the language, as both 
strengthened the disuse of the glib trilingualism which distinguished 
such a man as Gower, must, with other subtle and obscure influences 
of the same kind, have had effect. We see something of this effect 
in the lialf-defiant, half-despairing doggerel of Skelton, as well as in 
the patient plodding of Hawes. 

The details of the uprising of the great hybrid between poetry 
and prose — Drama — we still, for the same reasons of convenient 
juxtaposition, reserve to the next Book ; but more even than in the 
last Interchapter it is important to observe that its earlier forms 
were now perfectly familiar to the English nation, if they had as yet 
(till the very close of the period) scantily commended themselves to 
the regular practitioners of English literature. The mystery and 



INTERCHAPTER IV 217 



miracle-play had perhaps for centuries — certainly for some century and 
a half — been practiced by the not always rude mechanicals of prob- 
ably every great town in the kingdom. The farce-interludes, originally 
introduced to prevent the effect being too solemn, springing naturally 
out of such scriptural incidents as the Tower of Babel, or grafted 
without too much violence, as in the famous " Mak " scenes of the 
Secotid Sheplierds'' Play, had gradually detached themselves, and con- 
stituted almost an independent kind. The Morality was simply the 
dramatisation of the Rose allegory — the favourite matter of the time 
thrown into what was fast becoming its favourite form. That re- 
ligious feeling after the Reformation exaggerated the dislike of 
Catholicism for dramatic performance as such, and did not maintain 
the exceptional tolerance for religious drama, mattered little. The 
excessive earnestness and sternness of the time required easement in 
some direction, and found it in this ; nor was it till nearly a century 
and a half after the close of our period that Puritanism could have its 
way with the drama. 

Of prose, as the details given in the last chapter sufficiently show, 
it is possible to speak with less allowance. That the period gives 
one of the best books in English literature may be partly, though it 
certainly is not wholly, an accident ; that the translations, not yet 
final, but substantively formed, of the Bible and the adaptations of 
the Liturgy at its close have supplied nearly four centuries since with 
models of exquisite cadence, of enchanting selection and arrangement 
of vocabulary, is, if not an accident, the result of a concatenation of 
circumstances not all of which — not even the most of which — are 
literary. 

But it is no accident, it is of the essence of the literary history 
and development of the time, that the resources, the practice, the 
duties, the opportunities, of prose continue during the whole course of 
the period steadily to expand, to subdivide themselves, to acquire 
diversity, adequacy, accomplishment. That this is done for the most 
part through the medium of translation and compilation does no 
harm, but on the contrary does a great deal of good ; that a certain 
amount of the practice is in the nature of not always successful ex- 
periment is nothing to be ashamed of, or to be annoyed at, but, on 
the contrary, a fair reason for satisfaction and pride. No single 
secret of the greatness of English literature exceeds in importance 
the fact that Englishmen have never been satisfied to import or to 
copy a literary form bodily from any other language or country, as 
Spain adopted Italian artificial poetry, and as France adopted the 
Senecan drama ; and this has of itself necessitated constant and very 
often unsuccessful experiment before the right kind or the right 
adjustment has been hit upon. 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 



It is scarcely too much to say that the fifteenth century, with a 
few years backward into the fourteenth and onwards into the six- 
teenth, plays the same part in regard to English prose that the 
thirteenth century, with probably (for our knowledge is dimmer here) 
a few years backward into the twelfth century and certainly more 
than a few forward into the fourteenth, plays in regard to English 
verse. The necessary stocks of material, some of which will have to 
be rejected, are accumulated ; the necessary plant and methods of 
working, not a little of which will have to be perfected, are slowly 
and painfully elaborated. Additional lateness in time, and perhaps 
less difficulty in kind, give us indeed a more perfect result in Malory's 
prose than we can find in the verse of any poet between Layamon and 
Hampole ; but mutatis mutandis the historical position is the same, 
and the historical gains and results not so very different. No single 
prose writer, not even Hooker, was in any near future to do for the 
one what Chaucer in the later fourteenth century did for the other, 
but that again was a consequence of the necessities of the case. 

It is not the least of the advantages and pleasures of that 
historical study of literature which has, with halting footsteps, it is 
true, at last followed the historical study of politics and social 
development, that it provides these "condolences." these "vails" 
in the seemingly dullest period of the actual literary course. 
The airy generaliser may flap his wing disdainfully at the fifteenth 
century and hurry to pastures more succulent ; the merely indolent 
person may decline the labour necessary to acquaint himself with it. 
But both will do what they do, and decline what they decline, at their 
peril. Nor, while criticism accompanies history, is there any peril on 
the other side. There is not the least danger of any but pedants — 
that is to say, the same genus, but a different species of it, as the 
generalisers — neglecting Shakespeare or Spenser because they take 
the pains to read Barclay and Bokenam. Yet shall those who decline 
to take notice of Barclay and Bokenam run no small risk of not fully 
understanding even Spenser, even Shakespeare. 



BOOK V 

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO THE DEATH 
OF SPENSER 

CHAPTER I 

PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 

Unbroken development of Drama from Miracle Plays — Origin of these — The 
Miracle-Play cycles, etc. — Non-sacred episodes — Moralities — The Four 
Elements — Other Interludes — John Heywood and The Four PF — Thcrsites 

— Other Interludes — Their drift — Bale's King John — Ralph Roister Doister — 
Gammer Gurtoii's Needle — Gorboduc — Other early attempts — The demand 
and the supply — Early plays by Gascoigne and others — Disputes as to plays 

— Difficulties in their way 

The outburst of English Drama is so pre-eminently the glory of the 
Elizabethan period of literature proper, that it has seemed on the 
whole better to take no detailed notice in the preceding Books of the 
early experiments — not very early, not very numerous, 
and not of the first importance in literature — which we .Unbroken 

^ development 

possess in that literary kind. Among other advantages of Drama 
of postponing the treatment of these to this special place, '^"piays.^'^ ^ 
not the least is the emphasis which can perhaps best be 
given by such an arrangement to a protest against certain sentences 
of the late Professor Morley's — sentences astonishing in so careful 
a student of literature and so attached a lover of the drama. " The 
Modern Drama," says Mr. Morley,^ '* did not in any way arise out 
if the Miracle Plays. Miracle plays did not pass into morality plays; 
!or did moralities afterwards pass into the dramas. The modern 
rama arose out of the study and imitation of classical plays in 
hools and universities." Of these assertions the first three must 
directly traversed, and the fourth largely corrected. The modern 
1 Enclts/.' Plays, p. 2. 
219 



220 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO STENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

drama did arise out of the Miracles. The Miracles did pass into the 
Moralities. The Moralities did pass into modern dramas. And 
though the imitation of the ancient classical drama, and its perform- 
ance in schools and universities, coloured, shaped, generally in- 
fluenced, the modern drama most momentously, this drama no more 
arose out of them than Spenser arose out of Virgil, or Hooker out of 
Cicero. 

According to the system adopted in this book, we need concern 

ourselves little with the thin and dubious subject of the earliest 

mediaeval drama in Latin, and in the vernaculars other than English. 

It is sufficient to say that at last, probably about the 

these.° tenth century, the extreme disapprobation with which 
the Church had always regarded dramatic performances 
— a disapprobation justified not only by the moral scandals of the 
ancient theatre but by its direct association with the persecution of 
Christianity^ gave way very partially and very slowly, in obedience 
to the well-known principle of enlisting strong human tastes, as far 
as could be lawfully clone, on the side of religion. Whether, as is 
sometimes and plausibly contended, this was partly the result of a 
natural and imperceptible development of the dramatic side of the 
Church services themselves may be left undecided. It is sufficient 
to say that we have from France Latin mystery or miracle plays 
which may be of the eleventh century, Latin mixed with a little French 
nearly as early, and plays wholly in French which are as old as the 
twelfth. It is possible, from notices that remain, that there may 
have been English, or partly English, plays, if not of this same 
century, at any rate of the thirteenth. But those that we have are 
much later, the earliest ^ of them not being older than the fourteenth. 
And whereas at least two famous examples remain of purely secular 
French plays from the thirteenth, nothing of the kind is found in 
English till the end of the fifteenth, if not even later. Further, 
though we have a few miracle plays proper — that is to say, plays the 
subjects of which are taken from the lives of the saints and the acts 
ascribed to Our Lady — the majority of them are mysteries, i.e. 
dramatisations of the sacred history. Those which were wont to be 
performed by the guilds or trades of the towns remain to us in four 
large collections and a few other batches and single examples. Of 
these some account may now be given. 

1 This is usually taken to be the Harrowing of Hell, first printed by Halli- 
well, and assigned to the reign of Edward IL It is an interesting piece in not 
quite 250 lines of octosyllabic couplet, but rather rudimentarily dramatic. A 
prologue introduces it ; Christ and Satan interchange some half-score speeches of 
summons and refusal ; the janitor runs away, and our Lord, binding Satan, is 
welcomed by, and graciously answers, the patriarchs in turn. - 

j 



PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 



The four great collections,^ known by the names of their place 
of performance, are the York, Wakefield (also called Towneley, from 
the former owners of the MS.)? Coventry, and Chester „,, .,. , 

" . -' . 1 he Miracle- 

plays. The first extends to forty-eight pieces, and Play cycles, 

may go back to the middle of the fourteenth century ; *^'*^' 

the second to thirty, the MS. being a century later; the Coventry 
(same date) to forty-two; and the Chester (of which we have no 
MS. older than the eve of the sixteenth) to twenty-four. We have 
also one of a Newcastle cycle, one of a Dublin, an East-Anglian 
version of Abraliam and Isaac, one Norfolk " Sacrament Play," 
besides the so-called '' Digby Mysteries," fnd the oldest of all, the 
Harrowing of Hell, which has been thought to be possibly as old as 
the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The details of the per- 
formance of these, though very far from uninteresting, concern the 
history not of literature but of the stage. It is enough to say that 
they were usually divided among the handicrafts of a town, and per- 
formed by them on large movable stages or storied waggons in 
different open places. Of their strictly literary character some account 
is necessary. 

As may be presumed from the great numbers contained in each 
collection, the individual play is very short as a rule, indeed rather 
an ''Act" of the whole than a separate drama. But there is great 
diversity of length. For instance, the very interesting Second 
Shepherds' Play of the Towneley or Wakefield set has between 700 
and 800 lines; the first of the York set does not go beyond 180. 
The metre in which they are written is extrem ly various. We find 
both rhyme and alliteration — the two being sometimes combined ; 
long and short lines ; lyrical stanzas of the most various and com- 
plicated kind, couplets, octosyllables alternately rhymed, and other 
variations — no single metre predominating with anything like the 
same distinctness as that shown by the octosyllabic couplet in the 
French analogues and originals. 

A very little examination of these plays will show the astonishing 
fallacy of the proposition that the modern drama did not grow out of 
them. Miss Toulmin Smith has drawn attention to the interest- 
ing fact that the York or Northern cycle of mystery plays bears 
a remarkable resemblance, in order and choice of subjects, to the 

1 These are now accessible in the following editions : — York, ed. Miss L. T. 
Smith, Oxford, 1885; Chester, ed. Deimling, Part I. E.E.T.S. 1892; Toiv/ieley, 
ed. England and Pollard, E.E.T.S. 1897 ; Coventry, ed. Halliwell, Shakespeare 
Society, 1841 (reprint in hand for E.E.T.S.) ; Digby, twice edited by Dr. Furni- 
vall for the New Shakespeare Society in 1882, and for the E.E.T.S. in 1896. 
A most excellent selection from all these, with others from the Hcwrowing of Hell 
to early sixteenth-century pieces like Thersifes and B.ile's King John, will be 
found in Mr. A. W. Pollard's English Miracle Plays (Oxford, 1890), 



222 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

inv;Uuable Scripture-liistory paraphrase in verse called the Cursor 
Miindi {7nde p. 71), also Northern, and probably not much anterior 

to the cycle itself in date. In fact, the development of 
^p^sodes! verse-stories, sacred and profane, into prose tales on 

the one hand and dramas on the other, which we find 
exemplified in French, beyond all doubt took place after a similar 
fashion in English. And almost from tlie first in both languages we 
find the strict throwing of the Scripture history into narrative "by 
personages," as the instructive French phrase has it, incessantly 
diversified by, and gradually breaking up into, episodes and inter- 
ludes of chiefly farcical matter, which is only indirectly connected, or 
not connected at all, with the main subject. Instances of indirect 
connection are to be found especially in the story of the Ark and of 
the Tower of Babel, both of which were fixed on almost from the 
first as opportunities for comic by-play and digression. The great 
instance of the sheer addition is the famous Second SJiepherds' Flay 
above referred to, where the rogueries of "Mak," the sheep-stealer, 
are simply though not unnaturally superadded to the Gospel story of 
"While shepherds watched. their flocks by night." So the Magdalene 
legend gives the germ (of which authors eagerly avail themselves) 
not merely of comic, but of absolutely romantic treatment. In other 
words, Stcnnda Pastoruin of the Townele}' and the Digby Magdalene 
simply give us comedy and tragedy, or at least romantic drama, ready 
to hand, as additions in each case to the Bible matter. When these 
things, especially the farce parts, had once been given as zests and 
relishes, they were sure to be expected as a main element of the 
banquet, and by degrees to be presented by themselves. 

So again, nothing can be stranger or (except in so far as matters 
partly of opinion can never be said to be absolutely true or false) 
falser than the statement that the Morality did not arise out of the 

Miracle Play, and did not in turn hasten the modern. 
ora ities. qj-^^,^-,^^ having by means of the miracle play, and the 
miracle play only, taken regular rank as a department of literature, 
and especially of popular literature, was bound to undergo in the 
order of its appearance the various changes which passed over 
literature generally. In other words, and descending from the 
general to the particular, it was certain to experience, and to show 
traces of, the overwhelming spirit of allegorising which came upon 
Europe in the late fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth century. 
It did show them very strongly indeed, and the result was the 
Morality. This naturally did not altogether supersede the Miracle 
Play proper; but it took place beside it, the Biblical personages of 
the older form giving place to personified abstractions exactly as the 
knights of romance proper gave way to the Grand-Amours and King 



CHAP. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 223 

Harts of allegorical romance. The titles of the Moralities given in 
Mr. Pollard's excellent selection of this division of Drama — The 
Castle of Perseverance, Every Man, The Four Elements, Magnifi- 
cence — will, without going further, suggest and almost fully explain 
the nature of this class of composition, and the list could be largely 
extended from French, and not a little from English, sources. 
Generally speaking, the Morality either morals the whole life of man 
after the fashion of Havves and Douglas, or selects a particular 
vice or virtue for similar treatment. In form it does not differ much 
from a miracle play, though, being as a rule later, it shows the 
metrical and other changes of the time. Yet it maintains that 
singular indulgence in lyrical arrangement which has made some, 
hardly with exaggeration, call the Miracle Play itself the chief store- 
house of formal lyric in Middle English. 

This variety of drama has generally undergone, and must be 
said to a great extent to deserve, the reproach of being one of the 
very ^dullest divisions of literature. The fearful prolixity which 
attacked all letters during the fifteenth century did not spare it, and 
though English Moralities are perhaps shorter than French, the 
Castle of Perseverance above referred to extends to the very respect- 
able, or disreputable, length of 3500 lines. By degrees either the 
name began to carry a damaging connotation with it, or the thing 
was felt to require relief. At any rate, the Interlude — it is not known 
exactly how or when — arose in its place. There is no certainty as to 
tlie extent to which the proper meaning of the term " interlude " attaches 
to this class of composition ; but it continued, in name and substance 
both, to be composed for reading, if not for acting, in the remoter 
parts of England (especially Wales) till within the present century. 
Many interludes are simply moralities ; but the obviously correcter 
meaning of the word corresponds closely to the French farce, and is 
so used of the interludes in Sir David Lyndsay's great Mox?X\\.y-Sotie 
(vide ante, p. 177). The farce-interlude naturally continued that 
farce-episode of the Miracles and Mysteries which has been already 
noticed ; and though the regular French fashion of weaving mystery, 
morality, sotie, and farce in a tetralogy does not seem to have 
obtained with us, the Interlude gradually detached itself more and 
more from its companions. ^ 

We shall see this very distinctly if we take the plays contained 
in the two first volumes of Hazlitt's Dodsley^- most, if not all, of which 

1 It is important and interesting to notice that in the work of the last of the 
"giant race before the flood," Shirley, we have actually subsisting examples of 
the Interlude proper, and its resultant play, in the Contention of Honour and 
Riches and Honoria and Mammon. 

2 15 vols. London, 1874-76. 



224 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

are of the Interlude kind. 77^1? Four Elements is of the kind 
nearest to a Morality, and indeed almost confusable with that. The 

characters are the Messenger (showing traces of classi- 
EUments. ^'^ influence), Nature {Nat lira A^atiirata), Humanity, 

Studious Desire, Sensual Appetite, The Taverner, Ex- 
perience, Ignorance, " and if ye list ye may bring in a Disguising." 
As usual in this class of play, the dramatis personae so clearly betray 
the whole course of the action that one does not quite see what need 
there was for it, and rather understands the frequent disinclination of 
the early dramatist to provide these tell-tale dramatis personae at all. 
Humanity is coached by Nature, and more in detail by Studious Desire ; 
becoming a little tired by this improving company, he is bewitched 
by Sensual Appetite, whom The Taverner seconds very zealously. 
Then come in Experience and Studious Desire, who talk Geography. 
Humanity is fought for by them on the one side, by Sensual Appetite 
and Ignorance on the other, and is left undecided, pleading his case 
with ambiguous arguments to the returning Nature. The whole of 
this piece, like most of the early dramas, is versified in a sort of 
doggerel which takes for basis sometimes a longer line, sometimes 
a shorter, and may be called, rather for convenience than strict 
exactitude, doggerelised heroic or Alexandrine and doggerelised octo- 
syllable. The whole class of metre exemplifies the same influences 
which show themselves in Skelton and have been already discussed. 
The piece dates probably from the first or second decade of the 
sixteenth century. 

Calisto ajid Meliboea is a rendering of the famous Spanish satiric 
medley of the Celestina. Every Man and Hick Scorner are again 
moral interludes, but with a diff"erence, the first inclining to the 

general lines of the Morality as above given, the 
intedudes. second a very early example (it was printed by Wynkyn 

de Worde) of the invective so frequent in English 
against the deboshed youth who returns from foreign travel all 
the worse for it. Allegorical characters, however, are almost as 
freely introduced in the one as in the other, and the metre is- 
still doggerel. On the other hand, T/ie Pardoner and the Friar, 
which is one of the works of John Heywood, the chief named 
author of this stage of drama, has nothing allegorical about it, and is 
simply a dramatised dialogue between the two characters, in which 
the stock satire on the occupations of both is introduced. T/ie 
World and the Child and GocVs Promises are, the first a pure 
Morality, the second a cross between Morality and Mystery. But 
on The Four PP, another and the chief work of Hevwood, we must 
make longer stay. i 

John Heywood is said to have been a Londoner and possessed 



CHAi'. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 225 

of some property. He was educated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, 
which afterwards became Pembroke College, and is said to have 
been a friend of More. He seems to have been a fj^hnHevwood 
consistent Roman Catholic, and after some trouble in and The Four 
Edward's reign became one of the few literary favourites 
of Mary, and exiled himself after her death, dying at an uncertain 
period some twenty years after Elizabeth's accession. His son Jas- 
l^er Heywood was also a man of letters. John, besides being a 
dramatist as far as his time admitted, was a writer of epigrams and 
proverbs. The Four PF is a really amusing farce in doggerel shorts 
and longs, wherein a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Pothecary, and a Pedlar 
tell tales of their own and each other's trades, and compete which 
shall tell the greatest lie — the prize being won, as many know who 
never read the play, by the Palmer's assertion that he never saw a 
woman out of temper. The fun is rather infantine, and the literary 
merit not great ; but the advance on any previous dramatic matter in 
going direct to character for the interest, and the incidental allusion 
to jDlaces and manners, make it important. 

Another piece, trivial in itself but important for our purpose, is 
Thersites, which seems by some allusions to the birth of Edward VI. 
to be dated pretty exactly at 1537. It is a sort of Morality of 
Boasting, in Interlude form and with concrete characters 
instead of abstractions — to wit, Thersites himself; Mulci- 
ber, a smith ; Mater, a mother ; Miles, a knight ; and Telemachus, a 
child. Mulciber, at Thersites' request, makes him arms, the dialogue 
including a great deal of play on the word "sallet," as, but much 
more briefly, in Shakespeare. ^ The braggart's mother begs him not 
to endanger himself, but he scorns her and brags ever more loudly. 
He engages in combat with a snail, and after much vaunting and 
horseplay claims the victory, because the beast draws in its horns. 
Miles, who has supervened, suggests himself as a worthier antagonist ; 
but Thersites runs away and hides behind his mother, who succeeds 
in protecting him. Then Telemachus brings a letter from Ulysses, 
and the mother is forced by her ungrateful son's violence to pronounce 
elaborate burlesque charms on the pair, till Miles returns and drives 
Thersites off. 

All this is, of course, excessively childish, but we must remember 
that it was the actual cliildhood of the drama, that the mere gain of 
live persons for abstractions was immense, and that, after all, these 
plays were still a mere expansion of the burlesque interludes and 
passages in the miracles. The drama was only in a go-cart, but it 
was learning to walk 

The Interlude of Youth relapses upon general characters, but 

, 1 2 Henry VI. iv. 10, 



226 ELlZABErHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

endows them with greater Hfe and individuality than is usual in the 
Morality scheme ; and the same may be said of the not very differ- 
ently named Lusty Juventiis, which, however, is both 
InKriudes. longer and heavier. Jack Juggler forms a curious pair 
with Thcrsites. There we had classical names for a 
modern farce ; here a classical drama, the AiiipJtitryon, is travestied, 
though only to the extent of the misfortunes of Sosia, not those of 
Amphitryon himself. The title-hero plays the part of Mercury out of 
mere mischief, to tease and annoy Jenkin Careaway. The piece is 
one of the liveliest of its class, and shows the beneficial effect which 
the imitation and engrafting of the classical drama on the native 
stocks was producing. But it also shows most unmistakably that the 
modern play did not arise out of imitation of the classical drama 
alone, or even principally. The Nice Wanton is noteworthy for 
being neither allegorical nor the dramatisation of any known story — 
for though the names Dalilah and Xantippe are used for the light 
heroine and the shrew her mother, no incident or condition associated 
with the names themselves is brought in. Xantippe has three 
children, Barnabas, Ismael, and Dalilah, of whom the first is a good 
child, and the two others ne'er-do-wells, who are easily seduced by 
the Iniquity^ of the piece, and both come to the worst of ends. The 
History oj Jacob and Esau is simply the Bible story dramatised, no 
longer according to miracle-iDlay conditions, but to those of tlie 
interlude-morality. And Tlie Disobedient Child has once more an 
attempt at originality. It is the dramatised story of an imprudent 
marriage, by which the bridegroom offends his father, and only 
obtains a violent shrew for a wife. There is not much dramatic 
ability about it, but it displays more attention to style and literary 
language than most, and is, indeed, said to be the work of a Cam- 
bridge man, Thomas Ingeland. 

Lastly, the Marriage of ll'it and Science returns to the pure 
Morality scheme as regards plot and personages, but is regularly 
divided into acts and scenes, and has some attempt at orderly 
dramatic |jresentation. The ATew Custom, the Trial of Treasure, 
and other pieces of the same kind do not add anything very new to 
the list of varieties obtainable from the above analysis. 

But we can see quite sufficiently from it how, just as the Morality 

is the Miracle or Mystery, with Qualities, Virtues, Vices, personified 

States of Life, and so fortli substituted for Scripture 

^l^ift"^ characters, so the Interlude is the Morality, sometimes 

merely changed in name, more often lightened in the 

farce direction as regards handling, and adapted to a very wide range 

1 Here a "Vice" in both senses — clown and tempter. The Vice, as is well 
known from the Shakespearian use, was often merely or mainly the former. 



PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 227 



of subjects — scriptural, moral, classical, social, and what not — with a 
constantly increasing tendency towards the adoption of the regular 
classical division of acts and scenes, and towards the independent 
selection and working out of dramatic stories, invented or borrowed, 
in such a fashion that the resultants must fall, not into the arbitrary 
divisions of Mystery, Morality, or Interlude, but into the natural ones 
of Tragedy, Comedy, and that mixed kind which is perhaps most 
conveniently, though rather improperly, named ''Drame" in Frencji. 
There is still no reason for displacing from their position as early, if 
not certainly the earliest, representatives of comedy, tragedy, historical 
drama, and farce, the famous pieces entitled Ralph Roister Doister, 
Gorboditc, King John, and Gaiiiiner Gurtoti's Needle. Romantic 
drama, an original kind and a high one, was naturally not so 
early, and we do not meet with real examples of it before Lyly and 
Peele. 

Of these, Bishop Bale's King John^ which has been dated about 
1547, is the least important, and its right to be regarded as the first 
of our historical dramas has even been denied, on the plea that it is 
only a didactic interlude with a historical subject. This 
seems a little hard, for Bale is surely entitled to the ^^yj/^t'"'^ 
credit of seeing that the didactic interlude — that is to 
say, the play in the only state it had then reached — was capable of 
being applied to historical subjects, and so becoming the historic 
play in time. His object here, as in all his other literary work, was 
no doubt polemical — to advance the cause of the Reformation by 
exhibiting the patriotic objection to the power of the Pope; and his 
play does not exhibit much dramatic grasp. But he had already 
written Protestant mysteries, and evidently had a pretty clear inkling 
of the popularity and possibilities of the drama. He chiefly employs 
the long slinging rhymed doggerel which, as has been noted, is the 
standard metre of this entire class of transition inlays, as was natural 
at a time when blank verse had not, or had barely, been introduced, 
and when the unsuitableness of elaborate rhymed stanzas was becom- 
ing more and more evident, as the action of the plays became more and 
more intricately dramatic. 

The three others are of morg importance. Ralph Roister Doister, - 

1 Ed. Pollard, op. cit. supra. Bale, a Suffolk man, born with Dunwich in 
1495, went to Jesus College, Cambridge, took orders, married, fled to Germany 
in 1547, became Bishop of Ossory in 1552, fled again imder Mary, and on return- 
ing received from Elizabeth a prebend at Canterbury. He died in 1563. Bale 
was not a very bright example of a Reformer in all ways, but he wrote a good 
deal, including a bibliography (one of the first) of English literature, and no less 
than twenty-two plays, of which five only, in wliole or part, survive. These, 
except King 'John , are sacrcd-moral in type. 

■•^ In Hazlitt's Dodslcy, iii. Also separately in Mr. Arber's Reprints. 



228 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

the oldest and most accomplished in its own class, is the work of 
Nicholas Udall, successively headmaster of Eton and Westminster, 

who must have written it about or before 1550. 
^'^%'oisterf'' Udall was a Hampshire man, and is supposed to have 

been about forty at his death in 1556. He was educated 
at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and was a good scholar as well as 
a harsh master (he whipped poor Tusser, the doggerel-verse writer 
on husbandry, very much), a translator, and the author of some Latin 
plays on sacred subjects. But he would now be merely a name but 
for Ralph Roister Doiste>\ the intrinsic merit of which is considerable, 
though it has been denied, and which as ^ point de repere in English 
literary history is simply of the first importance. It is indeed 
almost by itself sufficient to correct erroneous notions as to the parts 
respectively played by the Interlude and the classical play in the 
formation of the modern drama. A man who wrote Ralph Roister 
Doister without knowing or having heard of Plautus would no doubt 
be a genius of extraordinary originality ; but a man who, 
knowing Plautus, and not having the traditions of the Miracle, 
Morality, and Interlude stage before him, imitated Plautus pre- 
cisely after the fashion of Ralph Roister Doister would be 
an unintelligible portent. The plot, though simple, is far more 
complex, and, above all, far more regular, than that of any 
mere Interlude, but the play is wholly built on Interlude lines. 
Matthew Merygreek, an ingenious improvement upon the '' Vice " 
of the earlier plays, out of mischief induces Ralph, a brain- 
less braggart and simpleton beau, to pay court to Christian Custance, 
the betrothed of an absent merchant. Gawin Goodluck. The discom- 
fiture of the gull who is actually beaten off by Custance and her 
handmaids, the by-play of those handmaids themselves, the misunder- 
standing with Goodluck created by false reports, and the reconcilia- 
tion, make a very fair dramatic scheme, which is carried out in 
rhymed doggerel of the middle length, not so short as that of most 
Interludes nor so long as that of Gammer GurtoiCs Needle. 

This still more famous piece, ^ which contains (though some say it 
only borrows) one of the best convivial songs in the English 
language, was acted at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1566. Its 

author, or supposed author, John Still, was a member of 

Gamvter ' ^ , . , i , 

Gurtons that coUege, and is guessed to have been born at 

Needle. Grantham alaout 1534, being thus a very much younger 

man than Udall, and. in fact, a member of another generation. In 

1570 Still became a beneficed priest, in two years more Dean of 

Bocking, successively Master of St. John's and of Trinity, Vice- 

1 Hazlitt's Dodsley, ibid. 



CHAP. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 229 

Chancellor of his University, and Bishop of Wells, where he died in 
1608. He had lived to see the English drama (of which he had, ex 
hypotkesi, written one of the first complete examples, and the first to 
be acted at either University) arrive at its highest perfection ; and it is 
said that when Vice-Chancellor he had to protest against the very 
practice, that of acting English plays at Universities, which he had 
initiated. The play, though a broad farce in tone, is arranged as a 
regular comedy, and the losing and finding of the needle which has 
been employed to mend the garments of Gammer Gurton's man, 
Hodge, is carried on by Hodge and the Gammer ; Tib, her maid ; 
Cock, her boy ; Diccon the Bedlam (mad beggar), the Vice or 
mischief-maker of the play ; a neighbour, Dame Chat, and her maid, 
Doll ; Master Baily, another neighbour, and his servant. Spendthrift ; 
Doctor Rat the Curate ; and Gib the Cat. The language is mainly 
dialect, and the vehicle, as observed above, is doggerel rhyme of the 
longest form — extending to fifteen or sixteen syllables. It is written 
with spirit and managed with skill, but unfortunately the language is 
of the coarsest kind — coarse even for this class of play, the authors 
of which are rarely refined. The magnificent drinking-song of " Back 
and side go bare, go bare," introduces the second act, has nothing 
particular to do with the action, and may be older than the play. 

It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast to this jovial piece 
than tlie tragedy of Gorboduc^ or, as it is otherwise called, Ferrex 
and Porrex, which was published, though surreptitiously, a year 
before Gammer Gnrton''s Needle was performed, and .had 
itself been acted five years eailier, in 1561. In the 
second and authorised editions, which did not appear till 1570, the 
name was changed as above given. The authorship has generally 
been attributed to Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, and though 
some champions of Sackville have tried to claim the whole for him, this 
is rather a mistaken partisanship. The rich and stately melody of 
the Induction and the Complaint of BnckingJiani (vide infra) certainly 
neither suggests nor requires to be eked out by the wooden dulness 
of this dreary play, which is simply of interest and importance (and it 
has a great deal of both) historically and not intrinsically. 

In structure Gorbodnc is a regular play on the strictest model of 
Seneca the tragedian, with a slight concession to the popular taste 
in the matter of '* dumb shows." Gorboduc himself is King, and 
Videna Queen, of Great Britain. They have two sons, Ferrex and 
Porrex, who quarrel, and four dukes, Cornwall, Albany, Logres, and 
Cumberland. Each prince has a counsellor, and has a parasite. 
There is a messenger to tell Ferrex's death, and a messenger to tell 

1 See Works of Thomas Sackville, ed. Sackville-West, London, 1859. 



2-,o ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 



tlie Duke of Albany's rebellion. The chorus consists of four ancient 
and sage men of Britain, and there is a secretary and a counsellor to 
the King to make up the tale of pairs or quartettes. No action 
happens on the stage, and the whole play, with the exception of the 
choruses (the stanzas of which bear some marks of Sackville's hand), 
is couched in correct but ineffably dreary decasyllabics, in which the 
sense usually lapses with the line, and the whole stumps on with a 
maddening, or rather stupefying, monotony. 

The full importance of Gorbodiic, and of the imitations of the 
Senecan drama generally, will be better seen later, when we come to the 
actual period of Elizabethan drama proper ; meanwhile it will be best 
to give some account of the productions of the ''twilight" 
^attemp"'.^ period — the first twenty or four and twenty years of the 
Queen's reign, when irregular and tentative experiments 
on the mixed lines of the Interlude in the broad sense and the 
classical play were frequent, and when the taste for dramatic enter- 
tainments was constantly growing, but when no one had as yet hit on 
a really promising vein to work. It is a division of literature which 
is not very easy for the historian. Little of it is of any intrinsic 
value ; a great deal has disappeared, or has never been printed ; of 
what is actually open to study most is anonymous, or practically so ; 
and the real dates of nearly all the plays are very uncertain, owing 
to the interval which usually elaj^sed between performance and 
publication, and the invariable habit of writing up popular plays from 
time to time by the stock poets of the different companies. 

Despite all the pains which have been spent on this very popular 
matter, the growth of the theatre proper — that is to say, of an estab- 
lishment for the production of stage plays only — is still obscure. As 
generally happens in such matters, the most reasonable 
andthc'supply. P'''^" ^^ ^° acquiescc in uncertainty on non-material 
points, and to recognise and hold fast by the material 
ones. For some two centuries probably, the acting of plays in one 
way or another by town guilds, by " servants " at court, by " servants " 
of the great houses, which were in effect minor courts, by monastic 
and collegiate-clerical households, etc., had been constantly in- 
creasing ; and from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards 
tlie appetite of the population generally had been thoroughly 
awakened. By degrees the trade performances, though tliey did not 
for some time disappear, dropped ; and the monastic troops (if we 
may use the word) were cut off by the Dissolution ; but the 
"children" — choristers of the great churches that survived the 
Reformation — and the " servants " of great houses remained. And 
yet, again, by degrees these " servants " formed themselves into 
regular companies, who, though they might retain for protection the 



CHAP. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 231 

name of some nobleman, were not really any longer members of his 
household, but gave themselves up entirely to satisfying the demand 
for plays. This demand had to be met on the producing side as 
well as the performing, and so came into being the profession of the 
dramatist, generally combined with other literary functions, but some- 
times not so, and often including the vocation of actor, though 
sometimes also not. 

The most important name of the dramatists of the early part of 
Elizabeth's reign, next to that of Sackville, is that of George 
Gascoigne,^ some notice of whose life and other work will be found 
below. His dramatic production includes two pieces, ^^^.j ,^ ^^ 
both translations or adaptations from the Italian, The Gascoigne and 
Supposes — a prose comedy, the first of the kind in o'lers. 
English, from Ariosto, and Jocasta, a tragedy Englished (with Francis 
Kinwelmershe) not from any of the classical plays of Laius' line, but 
from Lodovico Dolce's Giocasta. But many other persons known and 
unknown fell into the new way. The Cainbyses of Thomas Preston, 
Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and Master of Trinity, is said 
to be as old as Gorboditc itself. It is founded upon Herodotus, but is 
written partly in eights and sixes, partly in doggerel, has a Vice or purely 
comic character named Ambidexter, three comic ruffians, Ruff, Huff, 
and Snuff, and is altogether a curious compromise between an 
interlude and a regular play. The Damon and FytJiias of Richard 
Edwards, acted three years later, and written by a Christ Church man, 
who was Master of the Children of the Queen's Chapel, is a more sober 
production in long doggerel, with hardly more than one comic episode 
or interlude, which turns on the favourite legendary character of 
Grim the Collier of Croydon. The short and curious Apphts and 
Virginia by '• R. B.," which has been thought to come between 
these, is not in doggerel but in regular fourteeners, or eights and 
sixes, rhymed sometimes in couplet, sometimes in quatrain ; and the 
inevitable admixture of comedy, or rather horseplay, is usually small. 
But the best piece of this kind and period is the Tancred and Gis- 
viiind oi Robert Wilmot, which was acted before the Queen in 1568, 
and republished in 1592. The blank verse of this (which was 
originally rhymed in quatrain), though much "stopped," is less wooden 
than that of Gorboduc ; the fire of the original story in Boccaccio, which 
is so admirably revived in Dryden's version, is by no means absent ; 
and the chief fault is the absence of any really dramatic action, and the 
alternation of the dialogue between tedious set speeches of enormous 
length and snip-snap stichomythia. But with these drawbacks 
Tancred and Gismund is the most poetical play before Peele and 

1 Gascoigne's Works, ed. Hazlitt, London, 1868. Most of the others 
mentioned are in his Dodslcy, vols. iv. sqq. 



232 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

Lyly, if not before Marlowe. Of somewhat similar character, though 
nearly twenty years younger, and therefore belated in the dawn of 
the drama proper, is the odd Misfortuties of Arthur^ performed at 
Greenwich Palace in 1587, and composed by a society of wits, 
among whom was no less a person than Francis Bacon, though the chief 
writing is said to have been due to Thomas Hughes. The' verse of 
this — and indeed the tone generally — bears a strong relation to that 
of Tancred and Gisinnnd. It has a chorus in elaborate stanzas, 
dealing with the death of the King, as related by Geoffrey rather 
than Malory, but introduces Welsh names (such as Angharad), 
which must have been due to Huglies's reading in his native 
language, and is altogether, if not exactly a successful play, a 
respectable literary curiosity. The stately gloom which seems so 
natural to, or so well affected by, this period of the eve of greatness is, 
out of Sackville, nowhere better shown than here. 

Yet we have pretty certain evidence that these plays, and others, 
printed and unprinted, still extant, are but a small part of the actual 
theatrical production of the first twenty or thirty years of Elizabeth's 
reign. The lists of names that survive prove this, and 
^'^^piay^s*^ '° prove further that almost every kind of literature, sacred 
and profane, classical and romantic, historical and 
imaginative, was being dramatised. But the historical bickerings 
about the whole question of stage plays prove it almost better. Full 
fifteen years before the appearance of the first plays of the University 
Wits in the early years of the eighth decade of the century, these 
bickerings appear. The Church had always suffered the theatre any- 
thing but gladly ; and though the Puritans disagreed with the 
Church in almost all ways, here they went beyond her. The 
Corporation of London, like its analogues in most other towns, 
distinctly inclined to the ultra-Protestant party ; and it was owing to 
the obstacles thrown by it in the way of stage-playing that the first 
regular theatres were, about 1576, built just beyond the City bounds, 
in the privileged district of Blackfriars, in Shoreditch, and elsewhere. 
And how strong the feeling ran both for and against plays at this 
time, from which we have no plays worth speaking of, is shown by 
the notable history of Stephen Gosson,i whose School of Abuse, an 
invective, partly delivered against poetry in general, but mainly against 
dramatic poetry, survives, though most of the literature which 
occasioned it is lost, who was himself a "University Wit" of a 
generation before Peele and Lyly, who succumbed to the fascination 

1 The plays of Gosson (1555-1624), Catiline's Conspiracies, Captain Afario, 
and }''raise at Parting, must have been written long enough before 1579, the date 
of the School of Abuse, to allow for his conversion, and probably just after he 
took his B.A. at O.xford in 1576. 



CHAP. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 233 

of the stage, wrote plays, acted in them, was converted from them 
by religious denunciations, dedicated his pamphlet, it may be pre- 
sumed without permission, to Sir Philip Sidney, and thereby drew 
down on himself, though Sidney with characteristic courtesy does 
not name him in it, the famous Apology for Poetrie {znde infra, 
chap. iv.). 

Still, active as was the demand, plentiful in a way as was the 
supply, and high as feeling ran in regard to the theatre generally, the 
entire work of this long period — it must have been nearly forty 
years from Ralph Roister Doister to Tambitrlaiiie — is 
surprisingly rudimentary. The drama, though divesting Jheirway'" 
itself gradually of some of its extremer crudities, made 
remarkably little progress towards any really fresh, vigorous, and 
promising form. It is easy enough to see now that writers, even if 
they had possessed more genius than any of those of this date show, 
might naturally have been hampered and bewildered. The mediaeval 
forms, of which the latest phase was the Interlude, were slowly but 
inevitably passing into discredit, and were indeed quite incapable of 
serving as vehicles to any " intricate impeach " of character-drawing, 
of romantic interest, or of plot. The classical, or at least Senecan, 
model which was forcing itself upon all Europe was alien from the 
English spirit, and unable to give voice or shape to English conceptions 
of drama. And what is more than this, even if there had been a style 
of play to give, there was as yet no style of verse to give it in. The 
impossible doggerels, longer and shorter, were indeed, as well as the 
fourteener, giving way to blank decasyllables ; but the right mould of 
these had not been found. The writers, bewildered at the absence of 
their usual guide-rope, rhyme, feared to drop into absolute prose if 
they did not pull the verse up short at the end of the line ; there was, 
moreover, owing perhaps to mistaken deduction from Chaucer's 
practice, perhaps to transferred classical teaching, the superstition 
about middle caesuras, that we find in Gascoigne, and long afterwards 
in Dr. Johnson. The Chaucerian tradition, though not fatal, was 
unfavourable to trisyllabic feet ; and altogether the measure lacked 
the spring, the variety, the characteristics of roll and break by turns, 
which suit the dramatic wave. There cannot, indeed, be very much 
doubt that if a generation of genius had come a little earlier than it 
did, perfected drama would have come with it. But it was fated 
that the last, not the first, years of the Queen's reign should see that 
generation ; and drama waited with the rest. 



CHAPTER II 

PRELIMINARIES — PROSE 

Elyot — The Governour — Cavendish — Leland — Cheke — Wilson — Ascham — 
His Letters — Toxophllus — The Schoolmaster — Their characteristics 

The middle stage between that older literature which continues till 
a period well, but not very far, within the sixteenth century and 
Elizabethan literature proper is at least as clearly marked in prose 
as in verse or drama, and it contains matter of perhaps greater 
intrinsic interest than is the case with drama at least. We have 
seen how with Fisher English prose reached, and perhaps for 
the first time, the state of deliberate and conscious practice of the 
devices of style, and how yet farther advance, conditioned in the 
most momentous manner by the nature of their occupation, appears 
in the work of the early Tudor translators of the Bible. 

Contemporary with these latter were some other writers who have 
obtained a place, from which it is not necessary to oust them, in the 
history of English literature — Sir Thomas Elyot, Leland, Cavendish, 
perhaps a few more. The attraction of the first is 
indeed rather one of matter than one of manner, and it 
might be difficult to give any reason except the fact that it has been 
twice reprinted in the present century ^ for the position held by The 
Boke named the Governour, still more difficult to account for the 
reprinting itself. Sir Thomas Elyot, who was born before 1490, 
was the son of a judge, and though not a member of the famous 
Cornish family of his name, appears to have been a West Countryman, 
his forebears having been connected with the district round Yeovil. 
He must have been well educated, but does not seem to have gone 
to either University, and though a student of medicine, is said not to J 
have been a practitioner thereof. He came early into the possession \ 
of a good estate near Woodstock, and settled there ; but was made 
by Wolsey in 1523 Clerk of the Council — an office which seems to 

1 In 1854 by Mr. A. T. Eliot, and in 1883 by Mr. H. H. S. Croft (2 vols. 
London). The latter is the edition used. 



CHAP. II PRELIMINARIES — PROSE 235 

have metaphysical connection with Hterature. He published the 
Cover tioitr in 1531, and seems to have been recommended by it to 
diplomatic employments, in which he spent the rest of his life. He" 
died in 1546, having four years previously been elected M.P. for 
Cambridge. 

He wrote a medical work called the Castle of Health, a Latin 
Dictionary, some dialogues, and other things ; but his fame, such as it 
is, rests on the Covernour. This is one, and in England one of the 
first, of those curious treatises, partly of politics, partly The Covem- 
of education, which the study of the classics, and more '"'^^ 
l^articularly of Plato, multiplied at the Renaissance in all countries, 
and not least in our own. Ascham, Lyly, Mulcaster, and many 
others take up from their different points of view, more and less 
scholastic, the theme which Elyot set them the example of handling. 
Incidentally the book is remarkable, because it contains the earliest 
version yet traced of the famous, but too probably apocryphal, story 
of Chief-Justice Gascoigne and Henry V. when Prince of Wales 
— a pious invention very likely to flatter the powers that were. 
In the history of prose style Elyot is commendable rather than 
distinguished ; free from obvious and glaring defects rather than 
possessed of distinct merits. He is rather too much given to long 
sentences ; he has little or nothing of Fisher's rhetorical devices, and 
while the romantic grace of his not much older contemporary Berners 
is far from him, so also is the deliberate classical plainness of his not 
very much younger contemporary Ascham. He is principally valuable 
as an example of the kind of prose which a cultivated man of ordinary 
gifts would be likely to write before the definite attempts of Ascham 
and his scliool. 

George Cavendish, of the Suffolk Cavendishes, gentleman-usher to 
Wolsey, and the Cardinal's biographer, does the same service in 
showing the style of a contemporary less cultivated, but perhaps of 
greater natural powers, than Elyot, and not possessed of ^ 

1 -ii- -r r -r^ TTT -11 11 Cavendish. 

the special literary gift 01 Berners. We might almost call 
Cavendish a prose Berners —and his account of the greatness, decline, 
and fall of the Cardinal has something of Berners's charm. 

On yet another hand, John Leland continues for us the useful, 
and at this time really important, function of the " literary hodmen," 
as they have been contemptuously and ungratefully termed. He 
was a Londoner, born about 1500; and after being 
thoroughly educated at St. Paul's School and at both 
Universities (Christ's College in the one, All Souls' in the other), he 
travelled for a long time on the Continent and assimilated all the 
learning of the day. This was the time, 1533, when Henry Vlll.'s 
Renaissance fancy for learning had not been checked or stunted by 



236 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 



his own passions and the course of events ; and Leland, most 
fortunately, was furnished with a roving commission to examine the 
antiquities and libraries of England. His investigations anticipated 
the disorganisation in almost all cases, the ruin and destruction in 
some, that followed the Reformation, and his collections and records, 
touching not merely antiquities proper and topography, but literary 
history, are of inestimable value as regards matter. As regards 
form, Leland ranks with the two writers just mentioned, but below 
even Elyot so far as any particular charm of style is concerned. 
His phrase is sometimes quaint in itself, and always has the pleasant 
archaism of his time ; but it possesses no individual savour, and is 
once more only the literary vehicle of a man who sets down what 
he wishes to set down clearly and without any decided solecisms, so 
far as the standard of correctness of his own time is fixed, but who 
neither has been taught any kind of "rhetoric" in the vernacular nor 
cares to elaborate one for himself. 

Very different, and much greater, is the interest of a school or 
group of writers somewhat junior to these, who arose as practitioners 
of prose in the latest days of Henry VHL, but who attained their 
chief eminence in the reigns of his son and daughters. They were 
the direct and complete, as the others had been the partial and 
indirect, result of the new study of the classics, and especially of 
Greek, and as it happened, though that study had begim earlier 
at Oxford, they were all members of the University of Cambridge. 
These were John, afterwards Sir John, Cheke, Thomas, afterwards 
Sir Thomas, Wilson, and Roger Ascham. The last named is, for 
actual accomplishment in English, the most important of the three ; 
but all are of importance. 

Cheke was a Cambridge man not merely by education but by 

birth, and was slightly the oldest of the three, as Wilson was much 

the youngest. He was born in 15 14, and after a Grammar School 

education became a member, and in 15-50 a Fellow, of 

Clicke -'-'^ ' 

St. John's College, while three years later he "taught 
Cambridge Greek" as Regius Professor, and two years later 
again, " King," or rather Prince, " Edward " as tutor. He was 
lavishly rewarded by his pupil or his pupil's ministers, and received 
abbey-lands, the Provostship of King's, knighthood, and a privy 
councillorship. He was implicated in the design to place Lady 
Jane Grey on the throne, and though after imprisonment he escaped 
abroad, he allowed himself to be caught, and had to disgorge at 
least some of his gains, and to recant his Protestantism under Mary. 
Nor did he survive to see the wheel turn again under Elizabeth. 
Like so many of his generation, he appears to have been a time- 
server, greedy, a sycophant, and of no personal sense of honour or 



CHAP. II PRELIMINARIES^ PROSE 237 

consistency ; but a sincere lover of learning and an eager promoter 
of the above mixed scheme of mental education and political training. 
In philology and in English composition he had some crotchets and 
a good deal of innovating vivacity. He altered the pronunciation of 
Greek ; he tried to alter the spelling of English ; and (as we have 
seen from Pecock's practice) not exactly for the first time he 
endeavoured to introduce a "Saxon" diction at the same time that 
he shared, and perhaps caused, Ascham's predilection for the 
balanced Latinised sentence, adjusted rather to Greek than to 
Latin in its simple arrangement and order of words. Cheke's 
position in this history is rather one of influence than of per- 
formance, and his actual composition was mainly, though not 
wholly, in Latin. 

Thomas Wilson, a Lincolnshire man, passed through Eton to 
King's College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow in 1549, 
and was tutor to the sons of the Duke of Suffolk. He fled the 
country at Edward's death, and remained abroad during 
the whole of Mary's reign, though he suffered actual 
torture and danger of his life from the Inquisition at Rome. 
Elizabeth showed him great favour, making him Master of St. 
Katharine's Hospital (which he is said to have robbed or tried to 
rob). Secretary of State, envoy to divers countries, and even Dean of 
Durham, though he had never taken orders. He became a knight 
and a Member of Parliament, and died in 1581, being then about 
fifty-five. His works are various, and all remarkable as examples of 
practice, but the chief of them, the Art of R/ietoric,'^ which appeared 
in 1553, when he was about seven and twenty, combines practice 
with theory. It is, as a matter of course, in great part modelled 
upon Quintilian, and the rhetoricians of the School from Martianus 
Capella onwards, but part is original. And in this part Wilson 
expresses with great vigour sentiments similar to those of Cheke and 
Ascham, as to the importance of writing English matters in English, 
and for Englishmen, of avoiding strange " ink-horn " terms, and 
aftected Chaucerisms (this is a valuable date-point), as to the "foolish 
fantastical who Latin their tongues." And he has also the strong 
moral tone which, though his own practice and Cheke's might be a 
little wanting in some respects, distinguishes the whole school. 

Neither Cheke, however, nor even Wilson can be called a great 
or even a distinguished writer ; Roger Ascham - is certainly the 
latter, ' if not quite the former. He was a Yorkshire man, born in 

1 This book ought to be re-edited. 

2 Works including Letters, see Giles, 4 vols. Cnotninally 3), London, 1865. 
Toxophiliis and the Schoolmaster are each separately accessible in Mr. Arber's 
Reprints. 



238 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

15 15, of a fair stock. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge, 
in 1530, and learnt Greek from his scarce elder Cheke, becoming 
Fellow of his college early, and before very long Univer- 
sity Reader in Greek and Public Orator. He dedicated 
Toxophilus, in 1545, to Henry VIII., and under Edward became 
tutor to the Princess Elizabeth, and Secretary of an Embassy to 
Germany. Nobody quite knows how, without any overt recantation, 
he not only remained unmolested under Mary, but was actually made 
her secretary ; while he was also favoured by his old pupil after her 
accession. His second chief work, the Sclioohnasicr, was written late, 
and not published till after his death in 1568. Even this brief story 
shows that he must either have had extraordinary luck, or have been 
not entirely destitute of the " willow " character which infected 
almost all public men in Tudor days. There are also indications 
in his very pleasant Letters that he was by no means free from the 
rather shameless tendency to beg which was common to all but a 
very few scholars throughout the Renaissance. But these epidemic, 
or rather endemic, vices of the time excepted, Ascham appears 
to have been a very agreeable specimen of a good type of English- 
man : humorous, except for a touch of Puritan piiidery in regard to 
art and literature ; learned, and much more ready to teach others than 
to pride himself upon his learning; affectionate to his friends and 
family ; zealous for his country and his country's language. The 
famous phrase in the Toxophihis about ''writing this English matter 
in the English speech for Englishmen " is no mere figure of rhetoric 
or bit of jingle, but a sentence to which the author adheres as far as 
possible throughout his work, all the really important constituents 
of which, the ToxopJiilus. the ScJiool/ziaster, and the Letters, have 
already been named. 

Each of the three has its separate interest in the history of 
English prose, and the three together give their author a very im- 
portant place in that history. The Letters, as is natural, rank lowest, 
yet very far from low. In the first place, when we 
compare them with the Paston collection,^ the only 
really considerable body of English epistolary correspondence earlier, 
we find — not merely or mainly as a consequence of the fact that we 
are dealing with a professed scholar instead of with a family group 
of men and women of the upper rank indeed, and of fair education, 

1 This famous and interesting series, first published by Sir John Fenn a 
century ago, and definitively edited in three vols, by Mr. Gairdner, has in 
literature rather less importance than it possesses in political and social history. 
In fact, it may be said to lack the one kind exactly because it possesses the other, 
consisting of simple straightforward communications of fact and business from 
entirely unliterary persons. 



cuAr. II PRELIMINARIES — PROSE 239 

but of no special bent towards literature — a very distinct advance in 
command over the language for miscellaneous purposes. But we 
also find something more. At first the letters, even the familiar 
letters, even those to ladies and close personal friends, are written in 
Latin — the language which, as Ascham elsewhere candidly confesses, 
and as we can well understand from the general practice of the 
Renaissance, came much easier to him to write than English. But 
by degrees this changes. The same deliberate purpose which led 
him to write the Toxophilus in the mother tongue, assisted beyond 
all doubt by the same general unconscious '"' atmospheric " infiuence 
which was not peculiar to him, induces him by degrees to put his 
work, even of the most informal kind, in English, to write news of his 
German tour to his Cambridge friends in that language. He shows, 
in short, a sense of the fact — so slowly borne in upon English men of 
letters, even so much later and greater as Bacon and Hobbes — that 
English was not a mere makeshift, a mere engine of condescendence 
to children and grooms, but a vehicle of literature, not, indeed, perhaps 
quite so perfect (no man circa 1550 could be expected to admit that) 
as Latin or Greek, but capable of being immensely improved, and 
deserving of the pains necessary to improve it. But Ascham's 
chosen means of improvement, his aims, his ideal of English style, 
naturally appear best in his more formal and ambitious treatises. It 
is very lucky that there is so long an interval between the composition 
of these, and that their subjects are so different. Toxophilus is the 
work of a man of thirty, devoted to what was at once 
his own favourite recreation, and still one of the main- 
stays of the national greatness. Of course there is a good deal in it 
which is very remotely connected with archery. The author would 
not have been a humanist, or even a human being, if he had not aired 
a good deal of his acquaintance with the new-found and certainly 
not too much prized Plato, if he had not allowed large scope to the 
passion for education which characterised all his literary generation, 
and himself very particularly. There are many more tolerable gaps 
in English literature than the loss of that Book of the Cockpit, with 
wliich, much later in life, he intended to accompany it. But even 
by itself Toxophilus gives us a happy picture of that blending of 
instruction with pastime, which, by one of the greatest of the many 
pieces of good luck which have distinguished English history, 
occupied the minds and ideas of the men who superintended the 
transition from monastic to lay studies in England, and carried out 
the views of Walter of Merton, and the two Williams of Wykeham 
and Wainfleet, in succeeding centuries, with a fortunate development. 
The Schoohimster is naturally more serious, yet not too serious. 
Something of the old largeness appears in the first book, dealing as 



240 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

it does generally with the bringing up of youth ; nor does this dis- 
appear by any means wholly in the second, with its preciser subject. 

On the ready way to the Latin tongue Ascham may go 
master. wrong ; he does so go often, as in his polemic against 

romance, his fatal patronage of the pestilent heresy 
of imitating Greek and Latin prosody, not merely in feet but in 
metres, and other things. But in general he is an early and an 
eloquent defender and apostle of the true English education in classics, 
and in the vernacular for book-learning, in body-culture and healthy 
pastime, as well as in book-learning itself. 

And one at least of the errors just noticed was only a corruption 
of the best and central principle of his work in prose — the borrowing 
of all possible assistance from the classical tongues in the formation 

of a good English style. In doing this he stops rigidly 
^^erist^cs.^*^ short of classicising the vocabulary. Cheke does not 

dislike a mere Latinism, or Wilson an " ink-horn " term, 
more than Ascham does. Like both, and even more than both, he 
hates the modern foreign languages, and seems to be actuated by a 
positive and almost personal jealousy — not entirely groundless, when 
we remember how great the influence of French had been, how 
great that of Spanish and Italian was, and was to be, both in verse 
and prose — of their colouring and guiding. He retains, and even a 
little abuses, the specially English device of alliteration, and has a 
fancy which sometimes almost approaches the puerile, for arranging 
his sentences in strings or piles of half-parallel, half-antithetic clauses, 
after a fashion which we also find far back in the Middle English 
period. Indeed, some have even argued for a kind of ''Euphuism 
before Eup/iues^^ in Ascham himself; and some seeds of it are no 
doubt, and necessarily, to be found in him. But, on the whole, his 
ideal of an English clause, an English sentence, an English paragraph, 
is struck out on classical models — clear, not too long, but, on the 
other hand, not broken up into snip-snap, with no special rhetorical 
figure very apparent, and with the old poetical cadence and colouring 
carefully avoided, but sometimes fairly balanced, arranged not seldom 
with a weighty, yet lucid, sententiousness, and not very seldom rising, 
with some cunning, to a climax which permits the rounding off of 
the paragraph with real rhetorical effect. Ascham's is, in short, thei 
first accomplished plain style in English — the first, that is to sayJ 
that, while deliberately aiming at a certain amount of rhetorical 
effect, rigidly eschews the production of that effect by any such 
means as elaborate, highly coloured, or quaint vocabulary, by unusual j 
and invented tricks of arrangement, or by anything that can comej 
under the phrases (often loosely used, but intelligible) of ornate,} 
poetical, or impassioned prose. 



PRELIMINARIES — PROSE 241 



The classical turn communicated to English prose by this knot 
of scholars more particularly, and encouraged by others from both 
Universities, was yet further promoted by the continuing habit of 
translating from the classics, and from modern writers in Latin. 
The authors of these translations, except in a few cases, mostly later 
than the present time, such as those of North and Florio (which had 
great direct influence on English prose, and were themselves notable 
examples of it) hardly fall to be noticed here. But the influence of 
their practice is unmistakable. The great innovation of Euphuism 
{vide infra, chap, vi.) was rather an unconscious than a deliberate 
revolt against it ; the carrying out of the system produced in Hooker, 
perhaps the most accomplished writer of strict prose (as distinguished 
from the half-poetical vehicle of Malory and Berners) that appeared 
in English up to the end of the sixteenth century ; and even the 
great authors of the first half of the seventeenth were deeply influ- 
enced by the tradition of classicising. ^ 

1 To this period belong the later Tudor chroniclers, the chief of whom is 
Holinshed (1525-1578), a Qieshire man, it is said, by birth, and a Cambridge man 
by education, certainly one of those printer's hacks, or gentlemen of the press, to 
whom literature has owed something. Holinshed's close connection with the 
matter of Shakespeare, the divulgation of large passages of him by Shakespeare's 
commentators, and perhaps the fact that his Christian name was Raphael, have 
conciliated to him an almost disproportionate amount of esteem. But though he 
has no extraordinarily literary qualities, the "race" and the archaic fashions of his 
manner are irresistibly pleasant to us. 



CHAPTER III 

PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 

The state of poetry c. 1530 — Good effect of Italian — Wyatt's life — Surrey's — 
Wyatt's forms and subjects — Those of Surrey — The main characteristics of 
the pair— Wyatt's rhyme and rhythm — Surrey's metrical advance — Tottel's 
Miscellany — Other miscellanies — Verse translations — Churchyard — Whet- 
stone — Tusser — Turberville — Googe^ — Gascoigne — His Instructions — His 
poems — The Mirror /or Magistrates — Sackville's part in it 

The same character of transition and introduction which p.ppears 
in the prose and the drama of the latest years of Henry VHI., of 
the short reigns of his son and elder daughter, and of at least 

the first half of the long one of his younger, 
voexTy^c^\sl°- ^-PP^ars likewise in the department of poetry proper. 

Nay, it is perhaps even more remarkable there, for 
reasons easily obvious to any one who has read the preceding Books 
and chapters with care. Up to 1580, at or about which year the 
History of Elizabethan Literature, in the great sense, begins, drama 
was, and had been from its very origin, merely though steadily in 
the making ; it had never reached any form that could be called 
artistically complete. Prose, with some examples far more absolutely 
excellent than any that draina could show, and with a much quicker 
and steadier progress, was in the making too, and had never 
reached perfection, save in partial and peculiar instances and forms. 
But poetry had, as we have seen, gone through curious successions 
of inaxiiiia and minijiia. After it had assimilated the great blend of 
language and prosody fashioned during the earlier part of the Middle 
English period, it produced in Chaucer a poet of the first class, who 
stood in a sense, though not in all senses, practically alone. It made 
a curious relapse from metrical upon alliterative prosody, and had 
produced good work in that. It had seen tlie singular outburst of 
Scottish Chaucerian poetry. It had provided a sort of underground 
growth of ballad. But in England itself it had, after Chaucer, fallen 
off, as far as the production of literary poetry of great merit went, in 
a manner which has still rather to be accepted than accounted for ; 

242 



CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 243 

and the inability of the poets to sing had driven them to endless and 
strange varieties of squeak and drone. 

However Ascham and his fellows might dislike and dread and 
denounce Italian influence, there is no doubt that the way of safety 
was first opened to English poetry in these its straits by Italy. The 
sonnet — not alone, but chiefly — was the means of inducing 
English poets to gird up their loins, to settle the poetical "halian? ° 
accentuation of their language, to discard doggerel for 
regular metre, to arrange a poetic diction which should be neither 
stiff with the " aureate " verbiage of the rhetoricians, nor clownish 
with the vernacular of the doggerellists. Perhaps mere accident, 
perhaps the political and ecclesiastical stress of the years between the 
Reformation and the accession of Elizabeth, may account for the 
interval which elapsed between the composition and the publication 
of the chief documents exhibiting this new influence. But there is no 
explanation, except a purely fatalist one, for the fact that fully twenty 
years more elapsed between the actual publication and the following of 
the example to any good eftect. 

If there has ever been any mistake about the order of the two 
poets who heralded modern English poetry, it must have been a very 
strange one, the dates and facts about Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry 
Howard, by courtesy, Earl of Surrey, being altogether 

, , , , . , . . ■' , • , Wyatt's life. 

too clear and (despite their occasional uncertainty) too 
relatively certain to excuse the slightest confusion. Both were short- 
lived ; and so it liappened, not merely that Wyatt was considerably 
the elder, but tliat he died when Surrey was still quite a young man. 
The father of Wyatt, Sir Henry, was a person of distinction in Kent 
(though it is not clear how he could have been, as some authors say, 
"a baronet"), and the poet was born at Allington Castle in that 
county, in the year 1503. 

He was sent to St. Jolin's College, Cambridge, at the prepos- 
terously early age which was one of the crotchets of the Renais- 
sance, entering at twelve, taking his Bachelor's degree at fifteen, and 
his Master's at seventeen. He seems to have married very early 
too, was a gentleman of the King's bedchamber, a friend of Anne 
Boleyn, and knighted in 1537. He had his share of the imprison- 
ments which were the lot of Henry's courtiers, and perhaps, if he had 
lived, might have shared Surrey's fate. But he did a good deal of 
diplomatic work as ambassador in Spain and in the Netherlands, and 
died, being undoubtedly removed from the evil to come, in 1542, on 
his way to Falmouth, where he had a mission to meet the Spanish 
Ambassador and convoy him to London. 

Surrey's birth-date is not known, but it is guessed at 15 17 or 
15 18, probably in the spring of the latter year. He was grandson 



244 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

of the victor of Flodden, and his mother was Lady Elizabeth 

Stafford, daughter of that Duke of Buckingham who fell a victim 

to Wolsey's jealousy. He was thus of almost the noblest 

urrey s. ]^\qq^ jjj England, and at fourteen he was nominally 
wedded to Lady Frances de Vere, of a strain nobler still. They 
came together in 1535, Surrey meanwhile having been a sort of 
companion to the King's illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond. 
He seems to have been rather a lively youth and young man, and 
got into frequent minor difficulties with the law. But nothing at all 
serious is brought against him ; and his lamentable fate when he was 
barely thirty was due simply to the delirium of jealousy and blood- 
thirstiness which came upon Hepry in his last days, and which, if he 
had lived a little longer, would have finished the English nobility. A 
ridiculous charge of liigh treason was brought against Surrey, and 
supported by more ridiculous charges of quartering the royal arms. 
He was condemned and beheaded in January 1547, nine days before 
Henry himself went to his own place. 

There is no certainty at all as to the order of the work either of 
Wyatt or of Surrey, though certain poems of both date themselves 
fairly by reference to known events. This matters the less, however, 
in the case of men whose lives, as has been seen, were short, who 
represent very clearly results of the same influences, and who, as 
not merely from probability, but from Surrey's lines on Wyatt's death, 
we know, stood to each other half in the relation of master and pupil, 
half in that of fellow-pupils in the same foreign and chiefly Italian 
school. It will be well first to give a brief account of the actual work 
of each, and then to make some remarks on their common or peculiar 
characteristics. 

It is not for nothing that a sonnet stands in the forefront of the 
collection — haphazard as that collection, no doubt, is — of Wyatt's 
poems. For, various and remarkable as are the points of novelty in 
the work of the pair, the introduction and practice of the 
^d^subje°c™^ sonnet forms perhaps the most remarkable of these. 
And for some time the sonnets (with characteristics to 
be noted presently) continue — to give way at last to other (almost 
entirely love) poems in rhyme-royal, in octosyllabic couplets and 
quatrains, in a shortened rhyme-royal with an octosyllabic instead of 
a decasyllabic base, and in some fanciful stanzas, the base of which, 
following Skelton, though in more orderly fashion, goes as low as six 
syllables. A five-line stanza of heroics appears, and also eights and 
sixes, which may have been originally intended either for that form or 
as fourteeners with middle rhyme. Moreover, there appears also a 
curious form, which was very much favoured by all the poets of the 
mid-sixteenth century, though the objections to it are great, the 



CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 245 

alternate Alexandrine and fourteener rhymed in couplets. There 
are also rondeaux and other lyrical forms, though few and cautiously 
attempted ; and last of all we find certain epistles of a satirical kind 
and certain translations of the Psalms, couched in heroic quatrains 
arranged with curiously interlaced rhymes, as well as sometimes in 
ottava rima. 

The forms and contents of Surrey's poems, with one notable 
exception, are not very different from those of his master's — sonnet, 
quatrains, interlaced heroic-couplets, the jog-trot fourteener and 
Alexandrine, in which he even translates Ecclesiastes 
and the Psalms. The subject is mostly love, and satire Su°rey° 
is absent. But the added item, which is of the very 
first importance, is a translation of the second Aeneid in blank verse, 
of which there are no known earlier examples in English, though, as 
has been noted in its place, there are signs of something like it in 
Chaucer's prose Tale of Melibee. We can only guess how the idea 
came to Surrey or to some other unknown person, if (which there is 
jj*^' reason to suppose) he borrowed it. Although there is no blank 
verse in French up to this date (or indeed, except as a curiosity, 
since), rhymeless verses were attempted a little earlier than Surrey's 
date in Italian. It is, of course, very likely that these gave Surrey, 
as they gave the Spaniards, the hint ; but it is not quite impossible 
that this hint was not needed. It was a common and natural effect 
of the worship of the classics to look down on rhyme as a barbarous 
thing ; and it was not a very extraordinary audacity for a man, 
translating what was then thought the chief poetic achievement of 
antiquity, to resolve to imitate Virgil directly in not using this savage 
gaud. Nor, when alliteration had long been borrowing rhyme and 
stanza from metre, would it be unnatural for metre to borrow rhyme- 
lessness from alliteration. Nor is it absolutely impossible that 
Surrey would have gone the entire length of the next generation and 
have attempted not merely unrhymed English verse, but unrhymed 
English hexameters, if the language had been sufficiently under his 
command. It was lucky that it was not; for though it is impossible, 
as every fresh attempt shows, that the hexameter can ever rank in 
English as anything but a rather awkward tour de force, we might 
have had some trouble in getting rid of it, whereas in blank verse 
decasyllables Surrey at once endowed the language with its most 
natural, though latest won, and for certain purposes most effective, 
variety of verse. 

" If the language had been more under his command," it has 
been said ; and the words will aptly introduce one of the two chief 
points for notice in the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey. It has been 
repeatedly indicated in the last Book that either one cause or one con- 



246 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

comitant of the weakness of fiftecntli-century poetry in England was 
that the poets more and more lost this control of language. The 
The main char- '^^'^^'-'"^ are not positively known, and cannot be dogmat- 

acteristics of ically laid down ; they have little or nothing to do with 
^^^"- individual genius, though it certainly would ajDpear that 
Chaucer's English is in a state of premature and forced perfection to 
which his successors could not attain, and which, before any fit heir 
appeared, had become archaic. It would appear likewise that the 
completion of the constitution of English proper, the final severance 
from the Continent, and the changes of which the disappearance of 
the final uttered e is the most remarkable, had brought about, or had 
at least been followed by, some not clearly intelligible change in the 
whole tonality and vocalisation of the tongue. The new pronounced 
English was not adjustable to Chaucerian prosody, and it did not 
find what it wanted in alliterative verse. The results were that 
extraordinary stumbling and plunging, that driving of the chariot as 
if with locked wheels, which we have noted in Lydgate, in Occlev,\-, 
and even in Hawes, and from which Skelton only escaped (w, hen 
he did escape) by a series of clumsy gambades in doggerel. V/^t 
this doggerel did good by teaching the language at least to move 
with some flexibility, if with little elegance, and now came Wyatt and 
Surrey with the severe »ianlge of the sonnet and the rest to get it 
into something like graceful movement in regular form. 

What hard work they had to do, and to what extent they were 
still beaten by the antinomianism of the language in its 

and'rhythm'^ State of flux, will best be shown by printing Wyatt's 
first sonnet (which is by no means a specially terrible 
example), with foot-divisions and a few quantifying accents : — 

The long | love that | in my | thought I | barber 
And in | my heart | doth keep | his re | sidence, 
Into I my face | presseth | with bold | pretence, 
And there | campeth | display | ing his | banner: 
She that | me learns | to love | and to | suffer, 
And wills | that my | trust and | lust's ^ neg | ligence 
Be rein | ed by rea | son, shame, | and rev | erence. 
With his I hardi | ness tak | es displeasure, 
Wherewith | love to | the hart's ' fo | rest he | fleSth, 
Leaving | his en | terprise | with pain | and cry, 
And there |him hi | deth and | not hp | peareth. | 
What may | I do? | when my | master | feareth, 
But in I the field | with him | to live | and die, 
For good I is the | life | ending faithfully. 

1 Printed inTottel " luste's " and "harte's," but I do not think any metrical 
value was meant to be given to the e. 



ciiAi'. HI PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 247 

There are several things to be observed in this — the way in which 
the advantage, if not necessity, of a final couplet forced itself on 
these very earliest practitioners of the English sonnet, the remnant 
of the allegorical personification of the fifteenth century, and others. 
But the chief of all is the nervousness and uncertainty of the quantifi- 
cation and rhyme. We have already left the sheer verse-prose of 
Lydgate and Occleve at their worst, as well as the mere doggerel of 
Skelton at his best. But the poet still hobbles, at times painfully. 
In one line, as we see above, he is driven to make "takes" a dis- 
syllable, and to put an entirely non-natural quantification upon 
" hardiness," and " displeasure," which should simply change places 
in a nonsense verse. More surprising perhaps — for this liberty of 
stress is frequent in Chaucer, and continues to Spenser and even to 
Shakespeare — is the mistiness which seems to beset him in the 
matter of rhyme. It is clear that the first, third, and fourth rhymes of 
the sestet are on the ith only, yet he cannot resist the double rhyme 
" feareth " and " appeareth," though it not merely conflicts with the 
single rhyme of " fleeth," but itself introduces a quite false rhythm into 
the lines, making them in effect feminine-rhymed nine-syllable lines, 
and not decasyllabics at all. 

But these stumbles were inevitable in picking the way up the 
steep and stony path from the abysses to which English poetry had 
descended, and the very stumbles themselves are gain, inasmuch as 
they warn the stumbler to pick his way more carefully next time. 
Wyatt has the plain, straight (and also strait) ways of the sonnet and 
his other forms to guide him ; he has the enormous advantage of 
fresh models, different from the thousand times borrowed ones of a 
century and more past ; and above all, he has the gift of poetic phrase, 
which we meet again in him after many days. 

Into a bitter fashion of forsaking 

is perhaps better than any single line in southern English since 
Chaucer; and when we meet with such single spies we know that 
they will come in battalions soon. 

Wyatt found an apt pupil in Surrey, and there is, in fact, more 
progress between these two almost contemporary writers than we 
find after them in the more than thirty years between Surrey's death 
and the Shepherd''s Calendar. Henry Howard perceived ^ 

1,1 . r surrey s 

the absolute necessity of acceptin^^ a certain rhythmical metrical 
standard for a word, and not varying its values and advance. 
balance entirely at the pleasure, or rather the need, ot the poet. 
There is even in him a rudimentary discovery, or rediscovery, of a 
matter of still greater importance, the power which an English poet 
possesses of varying the harmony and composition of his line by 



248 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 



shifting the place of the pause. Neither he nor Wyatt, indeed, 
has arrived at the final secret, the license of trisyllabic substitution ; 
the most they can do in this way is a clumsy elision of the vowel in 
article and preposition. But it was just as well that too many 
liberties should not be taken at once, and that the decasyllabic as such 
should be reformed into melody before it was expanded by license 
into an hendecasyllable, a dodecasyllable, or even more. For the 
temptations of doggerel were still about, and were only too much in- 
dulged in the eights and sixes and in the " poulter's measure," ^ the 
compound of Alexandrine and fourteener just noticed. If any one 
had at this time indulged himself in the license of the dramatic or 
Tennysonian tribrachs, the result must pretty certainly have been 
chaos, and the language would never have had its period of discipline at 
all. As it was, there is reason still to marvel at the change which — 
no doubt half, if not all, unconsciously — these two " persons of quality" 
— one a busy diplomatist, the other a careless man, or rather youth, 
of pleasure — achieved. It maybe that neither Wyatt nor Surrey has 
left any perfect poem, that nothing of cither's is as sheer poetry 
equal to the best work of Sackville ; but their gain in form is almost 
incalculable. 

The circumstances of the publication of the poems of the two 
were peculiar. It had become the habit of printers and w-orking men 
of letters to make and issue, with or without permission, " miscellanies" 

of poetical pieces, sometimes attributed to their authors, 
Miscellany, somctimes not, and sometimes again (as was sure to 

happen) attributed wrongly. In the middle of the 
seventeenth century especially this joint custom of MS. collection and 
miscellany publication led to a great deal of confusion. To this day 
some of the most famous pieces of English verse — Jonson's "Sidney's 
Sister," Bishop King's "Like to the Falling of a Star," and others — 
are in a state of contested, if not e.xactly dubious, title between two or 
more claimants, while in the same or other cases the genuine text is 
very much a matter of guesswork. The publication of the chief works 
of Surrey and Wyatt with pieces by other persons of distinction at 
Henry VIIL's court — the unlucky Lord Rochford, Lord Vaux, 
Wyatt's friend Sir Francis Bryan, and others — was due to the 
printer Richard Tottel, and to a Huntingdonshire scholar, Nicholas 
Grimald, who has been thought to be an Italian and a Grimaldi. 
This is by no means necessary, for different forms of the name, 
ranging from Grimoald to Grimwald, are found in different coun- 
tries and tongues during the Middle Ages. Grimald, who was a 

1 Said to be (cf. our "baker's dozen") so called from the habit of poulterers 
giving twelve eggs to one customer and fourteen to another, according to fear or 
favour ; see Gascoigne (p. 39, ed. Arber), who seems to have invented the name. 



CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 249 

member of both Universities, lecturer at Christ Church, chaplain to 
Ridley, etc., was born in 15 19, and was therefore very little younger 
than Surrey, whom, as well as other authors of the famous TotteVs 
Miscellany ^ he may have known. But the book itself ^ did not 
appear till 1557, eleven years after Surrey's death and fifteen after 
Wyatt's. The editor contributed (at least in the first edition, for he 
left most of them out in the second) no small number of pieces of his 
own, and there was in both a considerable contingent from •' un- 
certain authors." Few of the uncertainties, or of the works of the 
minor lights mentioned above, are of great value ; and Grimald 
himself generally writes stuff which is only distinguished from the 
average work of the previous generation by being invariably serious 
in form, and by showing a metrical regularity which, if only sing- 
song and uninspired, is at any rate strictly observed. This is what 
is meant by the printer's apology for " the stateliness of style removed 
from the rude skill of common ears " — for " style " was then generally, 
and here clearly, used as including " metre," and the context plainly 
shows that the contrast Tottel was thinking of was with doggerel 
and ballad measures. And he was quite right. It is true that for a 
very long time Wyatt and Surrey have held their proper place in general 
literary history and criticism ; but there have been occasional 
attempts, if not exactly to degrade them from it, to glance at them 
as mere reformers of form. The retort is, of course, quite obvious, 
and entirely fatal to the sneer. It was reform of form that was 
wanted, for the simple reason that for a century and a half form of 
any meritorious kind had practically ceased to exist. At first the 
" stateliness of style " may have been all too near to stiffness, and no 
one with absolute inspiration may have been ready to take the pre- 
pared instrument. But the instrument was at last prepared. 

The poetical work of the period, before the appearance of the 
Shepherd^ s Calendar and after TotteVs Miscellany, divides itself 
naturally under three heads : i. Subsequent miscellanies ; 2. Individ- 
ual poets or translators of minor rank; 3. Sackville. An extreme 
purist might urge that the three, or at any rate the first and the 
third, are one. For Sackville's poetical work, which stands in such 
startling contrast to the wooden verse of Gorboduc, appeared in what 
was practically a miscellany, the Mirror for Magistrates. But it 
will be better and clearer to divide the subject in the order above 
named, and not to mention the Mirror till we come to Sackville 
himself. The two first heads will not delay us long. 

It is somewhat curious that TotteVs Miscellany, the popularity of 
which we know from the rapidity with which the second edition 

1 Ed. Arber. 



250 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

followed the first (itself reprinted in six weeks or so), with fresh issues 
in 1559, 1565, and 1574, as well as others later, and from the 
imitations of it, waited some time for these imitations. Few things 
indeed are more significant than the long "waits" between the 
writing and the publication of the poems contained in it, and the still 
longer ones before any dared to emulate it, when we contrast them 
with the rush and huddle of new and ever new poetry in the last 
half of the Queen's reign. 

The first actual successor^ was published nearly twenty years 
after Tottel, in 1576, and its name, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 
followed as it was by others, showed the influence of Euphuism, the 
period of Lyly, as compared with the sober Songs and 
cellanks!" Sonnets of the earlier book when Ascham had repre- 
sented English prose. It was the work of a man then 
dead, the dramatist and musician Richard Edwards. It contains a 
mixture of work of the former and the then present generation. Lord 
Vaux figuring beside Lord Oxford, the courtier of the old King's time 
by the courtier of the still fairly young Queen. Kinwelmersh, Hunnis, 
and other respectable men of letters of Elizabeth's day also make 
show, and there is one piece the initials of which (not given in the 
first edition) may be Walter Raleigh's. The book, though very 
popular (it was reprinted once a year for three years, and repeatedly 
afterwards), was not much of a Paradise, nor its devices very dainty. 
But they were "as their pretty if affected title might seem to warrant, 
better than those of the absurdly named and dully filled Gorgeous 
Gallery of Gallant Ittventions which followed two years later, and 
seems to have been collected and partly written by Owen Roydon and 
T. P. (Thomas Proctor). The mania for alliteration which beset the 
writers of this time so strongly was particularly strong in T. P., who, 
outdoing even Churchyard {7>ide infra), distingnislied himself by print- 
ing a production proclaimed to be " Pretty Pamphlets by Proctor." 
The willow .song — 

Willow, willow, willow, sing all of green willow — 

appears here. The later Elizabethan miscellanies are infinitely 
better, but they come after Spenser. 

Next to the miscellanies, the verse translations make a great 

1 All the more important of these miscellanies up to the Queen's death were 
reprinted together by Collier in 1867; but the issue was private and very small, 
and the book hardly ever occurs in catalogues. Mr. Arber, iiesides Tottel, has 
given (in his "English Scholar's Library") Robinson's Handful of Delights; 
Mr. Bullen England's Helicon, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. Park's 
Heliconia (3 vols. 1815) contains, besides the Handful, the Gorgeous Gallery, the 
J'hoenix Nest, and the large and interesting anthology, rather than miscellany, of 
Eiis^land's Parnassus. 



CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 251 

figure in the poetical production of this time, though again it cannot 
be said that they attain to high poetical merit. In any case, no 
doubt, the popularity of the classics would have brought 
them about ; but the action of Surrey, whose authority tianstatbns. 
was so great in other ways, made them certain. The 
translators,^ however, were by no means bold enough to follow his 
example of blank verse as a matter of course. They preferred as a 
rule the too often clumsy fourteener, which, just as it was much later 
going out of fashion, gave us the splendid Homeric paraphrase of 
Chapman. There was little splendour about the earlier examples, 
but the first of them had great influence in other ways, being a 
version of Seneca''s Troades by Jasper Heywood, son of John, Fellow 
first of Merton and then of All Souls', and in Elizabeth's time a 
Jesuit. This play was issued as early as 1559, two years only after 
Totters Miscellany, and by the same printer. He followed it up 
with two others, the Thyestes and Hercules Fitrens, and the example 
being caught at, the whole ten Senecan plays were issued together 
in 1 581. Rhyme-royal, the quatrain, and other stanzas are used for 
the chorus ; but the ambling fourteener serves as the staple. 

This was also the metre of Phaer's Virgil, which appeared, as far 
as the first seven books went, the year after Tottel, and was finished 
partly by the author, partly after his death in 1560 by another hand. 
Phaer was a Pembrokeshire man, a member of the . University of 
Oxford, a lawyer, and a doctor. There is merit in his version (which 
shows a consciousness of trisyllabic substitution and its advantages), as 
there is also in the companion Ovid of Arthur Golding, a man of 
property and good connections, who was born about the middle of 
the fifth decade of the century, and lived till its close. He did prose 
as well as verse translations ; but the MetaniorpJioses was his chief 
book, and this appeared in 1567, again in fourteeners. The verse 
translators cannot indeed boast, as the prose can, that they had a 
distinct and important influence on the development of style in their 
own sphere, but the two helped in the practice, the exercise, which 
was the business and the benefit of this particular time. 

The individual authors of the period other than Sackville partake 
of that character of curiosity which distinguishes the whole of it, and 
which repels some tastes as much as it conciliates others. The chief 
names are Churchyard, Whetstone, Tusser, Turberville, Googe, and, 
above all, George Gascoigne, the type, and at the same time the most 

iThey have not had quite their share of the otherwise indiscriminate devotion 
of reprinters, Stanyhurst's rather later and extremely mad Acncid having almost 
alone the honour to be recently given (in Mr. Arber's "English Scholar's 
Library"). The translators of Seneca besides Heywood were Neville, Studley, 
Nuce, and Newton. 



252 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

eminent, of the whole. It is ahnost enough to say, on the one hand, 
that to no single one of the six is ascribed even the smallest piece of 
verse which has made its way into the memory of the general. 
On the other hand, all have importance to the historian, and 
Gascoigne is, as has been said, very decidedly the typrcal man of 
letters of the first half of the great Queen's reign. 

Thomas Churchyard, first born and last to die of all the 

group, was a Shropshire man, born at Shrewsbury about 1520, and 

so not much younger than Surrey, a juxtaposition which makes all 

the more striking the fact that he did not die till the 

urc yai . ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ James I. It would appear that he took 
the portion of goods that belonged to him and went to court early 
enough to become "servant" to Surrey, in those conditions of 
honourable and gentle service and education which flourislied for 
some time to come. The connection was continued long after his 
chief's death by his contributions to ToticVs Miscellany. But long 
before the appearance of that book Churchyard had seen other and 
hotter service in the Netherlands (1542) and Scotland (1545), had 
been taken prisoner in a second Scotch campaign (1548), had travelled, 
had served in Ireland (1550), in Lorraine, in the Netherlands again, 
at Calais, or at least Guines, just at the period of its loss. He had 
begun a long series of mostly petty individual contributions to 
literature when he was about thirty; but his historical importance 
begins with his contribution to Tottel in 1557, and to the Mirror for 
Magistrates (see below) in 1558-59. After several more years of 
fighting and writing he collected his work, or some of it, under the 
alliterative and exact title of Churchyard'' s Chips, modestly accounting 
in prose for the selection of the same. Fighting he continued till 
the siege of Zutphen in 1572, just thirty years after he had first taken 
arms ; writing he never left oi^' till the close of his long life, the later 
part of which was spent in court service. So late as 1604 his Good 
Will, a poem on the death of Archbishop Whitgift, preserved, in a 
manner which must have seemed odd enough to the hearers of 
Donne and the survivors of Spenser, the lolloping verse, the curious 
antithetic alliteration, the wooden scheme of the poets of this later 
transition. Churchyard has been affectionately taken up, more than 
once, by men of letters as a curiosity ; and it must be admitted that 
worse writers than he have had the honour of complete editions, 
which he has lacked.^ 

In George Whetstone, whose date of birth and death are both 
unknown, we have another example of the type so common at this 

^Helicotiia contains some things of his— including the Whitgift piece, and 
there are a few other poems accessible in modern books; but little enough for a 
man whose bibliography fills nearly 10 columns in Hazlitt's Handbook. 



CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 253 

time, and of the characteristics of alliteration, of a sort of survival 
of allegory, and of a kind of composition which, though advanced 
beyond the mere rudiments, is still stiff and wooden. The 

Whetstone 

earliest dated thing that we have of his is the Rock of 
Regard, 1576, a miscellany mostly in verse; the latest is supposed 
to date from 1587, and is a pamphlet on the execution of Queen 
Mary " and other notable traitors." The only things of Whetstone's 
at all generally known are his play of Promos and Cassandra (a dull 
thing, but in Dodsley) and his Remembrance of George Gascoigne, 
which has commonly,^ though not always, accompanied reprints of that 
poet. He was rather fond of these poetical obituaries or remem- 
brances,'^ of which about half a dozen are known ; and he also wrote 
prose tales, chiefly collected in a Heptameron (the title, of course, 
suggested by Margaret of Navarre) of Civill Dyscourses. These 
prose tales, indeed, which played so important a jjart in the furnishing 
of subjects to the dramatists, were almost as much a feature of the 
time as the poetical miscellanies and verse translations. The largest 
and best known is William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (alliterative 
again), which appeared in 1566-67.^ 

Of the two T's, Tusser and Turberville, the former is not a poet 
at all, but a verse-curiosity. He is our only, or almost our only, 
English Georgic poet, and his poetry frankly acquiesces in doggerel. 
His life, which seems to have dated from about 15 15 to 
1580, began in Essex, was passed at St. Paul's and 
Eton (where Udall, as previously observed, beat him much), at Cam- 
bridge, at court, and lastly on a farm in Sussex, where he cultivated 
and rhymed. His Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry,^ pub- 
lished in 1573, contains more than 2000 quatrains in anapaestic 
tetrameters, rolling, but with a regularity testifying to UdalFs 
care. 

George Turberville, on the other hand, was a poet — certainly the 
best poet of the time (always excepting Sackville) next to Gascoigne, 
and perhaps Gascoigne's equal. He was a Dorsetshire man, who 
must have been born about njio? and was not dead ten „ , 

TLirbervilIe. 

years before the end of the reign, who went to Winchester 

and New College, did some diplomatic work in Russia, and seems to 

have been of independent fortune. Like most of his contemporaries, 

1 As, for instance, in Chalmers's Poets, vol. ii., and in Mr. Arber's Reprint of 
the Steel Glass. 

2 Heliconia, vol. ii., contains one on the Earl of Bedford. 

3 This huge compilation from the chief French and Italian novel collections 
has had the honour of two reprints, one in 1813 by Haslewood, and one in 1890 
by Mr. Joseph Jacobs. 

^ It had appeared as "One Hundred" only in the year of Toftel. Being full 
of folk-lore and other extra-literary interest, it has been several times reprinted. 



254 ELIZABErHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

he was specially addicted to translation in prose and verse from 
ancients and moderns. But in 1570 he produced a volume of Epitap/is, 
Epigrams, So)igs, and Sonnets?- Turberville has not much power of 
continued poetical flight, but there is in some of his lyrics a genuine 
and unforced sweetness which is extremely agreeable, and at this 
time very rare. 

His friend Barnabe Googe,'- who is thought to have been born 
about 1540, and who died in 1594, cannot be complimented on much 
lyrical gift ; but some Eclogues of his have importance, and in his 
Cupid Conquered he has some of the appeal of a pred- 
ecessor — though afar off — of Spenser. He came from 
Lincolnshire, and was a son both of Oxford and Cambridge, a 
client of Burleigh's, and a particularly active and miscellaneous trans- 
lator, of extreme Protestant tendencies in his selection of books to 
translate. The most obvious oddity of Googe's original poems, the 
extraordinary fashion in which the lines are divided — for instance, 
decasyllabics being split up into fours and sixes, and Alexandrines 
into quarters — is thought to have been due to the mere mechanical 
shiftlessness of the printer, who had a small page and large type. 
Googe, when he is not simply flat, often sins by the use of the 
bombastic and fustianish style, which was common, and at which 
Shakespeare laughs with .such merciless good nature. 

Among these shadows and others more shadowy still, — the very 
" Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece " in English 
literature, — George Gascoigne gives us at least something like a sub- 
stantive figure.^ His life, though not so long as Church- 

Gascoi"ne " . ° . ° 

° ' yard's, was nearly as typical, and his work was much 
better. Like most of the men with whom he is here associated, but 
even more than most of them, Gascoigne was a person of birth, 
breeding, and education. He was the son of a Bedfordsliire knight. 
Sir John Gascoigne, and was connected on his mother's side with 
Frobisher the seaman. He was a Cambridge man, his college being 
Trinity, and, like most University men perhaps for some three 
centuries, finished his education at the Inns of Court — in his case, 
Gray's Inn and the Temple. He was born about 1537, and can 
have been hardly of age when he entered Parliament, sitting for 

1 Reprinted in Chalmers, vol. ii. 

2 See Mr. Arber's Repiints. Of Googe's translations, the Popish Kingdom 
(from the Rcgniim Papisttcum of Naogeorgus or Kirchmeyer) had the honour of 
an extremely handsome black-letter reprint in 1880, the editor being Mr. R. C. 
Hope. It is in fluent and freely alliterated fourteeners, but its literary interest is 
very small. 

3 Poems in Chalmers, vol. ii., and more completely by W. C. Hazlitt; the 
Steel Glass, the Coiiiplauit of Philomene, and the Notes in Arber's Reprints. 
There is a good study of Gascoigne by Dr. Schelling of Philadelphia. 



CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 255 

Bedford in 1557. He must liave begun to write verse very early, 
but printed nothing for some years. His translated or adapted 
tragedy and comedy already referred to (p. 231) were acted in Gray's 
Inn Hall in 1566. He married in 1567, served in the Netherlands 
in 1572. and onwards to 1574, and in the first of these years pub- 
lished, or had published for him (there was often a little innocent 
make-believe about these things in those days), a collection of poems 
styled A Hundred Sundry Flowers, which in the later issue of 1575 
was divided into Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds. He had to do with 
the Kenihvorth Revels in 1575, and next year published his Steel 
Glass, a regular satire of considerable length in blank verse. He 
died in October 1577. Besides the works already mentioned, Gas- 
coigne is noted for the first translated prose tale from Bandello (a 
style so much followed by Painter and others), and for his very 
important Certain Notes or Instructions concerning tJie Making of 
Verse or Rhyme in English. 

These Instructions, being criticism, not creation, escape the draw- 
backs of the other work in regard to intrinsic merit, and hold a 
secure position, comparable in Englisji, — though, of course, with great 
abatement of scale and genius, — to that held by Dante's 
De Vul^ari Eloquio in Italian. They are very short; "'^i"'/.''"" 
and although Gascoigne had a long past of English 
behind him, it will readily be apprehended by intelligent readers of 
the foregoing pages that his actual knowledge of English poetry was 
not great. The study of Anglo-Saxon was indeed reviving in his 
time, but it did not affect ordinary men of letters for many genera- 
tions to come. Nor do Gascoigne or his contemporaries and followers 
seem to have been acquainted with any Middle English writers 
before Chaucer, though Piers Plowman was not an unknown book. 
Gascoigne himself only glances at alliterative metre in the terms of 
Chaucer's own scoff at it, does not mention a single poet by name 
except Chaucer himself, and as his followers, the later Elizabethan 
critics (see chap, vi), also did, though still more decidedly, confines 
himself mainly to a rhetorical abstract of the Art of Poetry, dwelling 
successively on the necessity of fresh invention and the avoidance of 
commonplaces, on the importance of ''keeping the measure," and not 
(for instance) slipping from poulter's measure — Alexandrines and 
fouvteeners — to fourteeners by themselves ; on quantity, accent, and 
metre generally ; on the disadvantage of polysyllables, and the 
impropriety of coining words for rhyme's sake ; on the danger (a 
caution very specially needed, as we have seen) of excessive allitera- 
tion and of inusitate word-inversion ; on the pause ; on rhyme-royal 
and other stanza forms ; and on "riding rhyme " (the heroic couplet). 
The most really noticeable thing about the whole is Gascoigne's 



256 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

assumption (all the more important because he is evidently not satis- 
fied with it) that the decasyllable must be confined to strict iambics 
and to the middle pause. We have seen how this undue, but for the 
time salutary, restraint was arrived at ; we shall see how it was 
removed. 

Gascoigne's practice, as compared with that of his neighbours, 
certainly does not discredit the maxim that " every poet should con- 
tain a critic." Except Sackville, he is the best poet of the group, 
and he goes far beyond Sackville in the one point of 
IS poemb. ^.j^j.jg^y -Yhe blank verse of the Steel Glass is indeed 
marred by the at this time universal fault of staccato movement — the 
lines being far too often concluded within themselves in sense, and 
the monotony being increased by the poet's acceptance of the middle 
pause, and by his abuse of the practice of beginning successive lines 
with the same word.^ Yet though not vivid, it is generally vigorous, 
and sometimes even incisive. The lyrics and stanza poems escape 
this drawback, and, though the author recks his own rede about 
excessive alliteration but ill, attain very commonly to prettiness and 
not seldom to pathos. The same mark of a certain childishness is 
still on the verse; but it very often has the grace as well as the 
immaturity of childhood. 

There is nothing childish about the few and noble verses of 

Thomas Sackville.- They were published in a curious book which, 

except in the pages contributed by Sackville himself, has very small 

rr,^ ,r- literary, as compared with its historical, interest. The 

The Mirror -" , , . , , • , • e 

JorMagis- Mirror for Magistrates was planned m the reign or 
trates. Q^,ggn Mary by William Baldwin, an Oxford man, a 
priest, a scholar, a schoolmaster, and a printer, who seems to have 
been born not long after the beginning of the century, and George 
Ferrers, a member of tiie same University, of Lincoln's Inn, and of 
Parliament, a writer on legal and historical subjects, as well as of 
interludes, who died in 1579. The book, which was intended to be 
a sort of supplement to Lydgate's version of Boccaccio's Falls of 
Princes, is said to have been printed in part as early as 1555, but 
was interfered with by Gardiner and did not attain license for publica- 

1 It is of the first interest to notice how this practice, which is so effective for 
good in the mobile-centred and complex-footed verse of Tennyson, aggravates the 
monotony of strict decasyllabics with the immovable middle pause. 

2 Sackville's drama has been already dealt with. His life only touched 
literature in those two early passages of it. He was born (his father, Sir Richard 
Sackville, was Chancellor of the Exchequer) about 1536, at Buckhurst, and is 
supposed to have been a member of Hart Hall, St. John's College, Oxford, 
and of the Inner Temple. He was made Lord Buckhurst in 1567, K.G. in 
1589, Lord Treasurer in 1599, and Earl of Dorset in 1604. He died at the 
Council table four years later. 



CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 257 

tion till 1559. It contained nineteen "tragedies " by Baldwin, Ferrers, 
and Phaer ( ?), Sackville not being yet a contributor. His two pieces, 
the Induction (not to the general work but to such '• tragedies " as 
he might write) and the Complaint of BnckingJiain, appeared in the 
second and enlarged edition of 1563, to which Churchyard also con- 
tributed. To complete the general story of the book, in 1574 John 
Higgins issued a fresh batch, taken from earlier times between 
Brutus and Caesar, and four years later Thomas Blennerhassett added 
pieces dealing with the first thousand years of the Christian era. 
Baldwin's and Higgins's, but not Blennerhassett's, parts were united, 
(still with new matter) in 1587, and at last, in 1610, the whole, again 
with additions, came together. Consisting, as the book does, entirely 
of tragical stories from English history, and covering, as its various 
issues do, almost the whole period during which, as we shall see, 
verse-history was a specially favourite form, it cannot lack a certain 
interest. But its merit as poetry is almost entirely confined to 
Sackville's contributions.^ 

They are short enough. The Induct ion and TIic Complaint of 
Henry, Duke of Buckingham (Richard lll.'s victim, not Wolsey's) 
•occupy between them less than 200 stanzas in rhyme-royal, or 
rather more than 1300 lines. The language, as comports 
with the metre and with the design of the book to supply p^'il^'Jn'ft^ 
a sort of sequel to Lydgate, is a little archaic. There is 
even an attempt, doubtless also deliberate, to keep up fifteenth-century 
style both in personifying allegory and in a sort of modified *' rhetoric." 
But hardly a single stanza, certainly no single page, can be read 
by a poetically minded reader without his being well aware that an 
entirely new music is sounding in his ears, a music of which per- 
haps a faint, far-off anticipation may be discovered in the " Cressid " 
stanzas of Henryson already so highly praised, but which is now fully 
organised in diapason. This is by no means due merely, though it 
is in part, to the fact that the writer has entirely shaken off the 
metrical palsy of the fifteenth century itself, and has, moreover, 
emerged from the swaddling-clothes of the transition prosody. 
Even his archaism does not make Sackville stiff; even such un- 
comely survival-catchwords of poetic diction as "hugy" do not 
make him stale or flat. He has thoroughly saturated and in- 
formed his old stanza with the vigour and variety of the new line 
which the poets from Wyatt onwards had been gingerly and tenta- 
tively fingering at. He has not the slightest need of the clumsy 
stop-at-the-end with which they are wont to stay themselves like 
skaters in their novitiate, who bring themselves up by digging in a 

1 The athletic Haslewood grappled with the whole in his 3 vol. reprint (1815), 
but the adventure has not been re-attempted, 
s 



258 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

pointed stick for fear of slipping, and never dare strike out. It can- 
not be expected that he should have mastered (as indeed nobody did 
till Shakespeare) the crowning secret of English verse, the glorious 
liberty of the ubiquitous pause. But he already knows how to vary 
it, is under no such superstition as Gascoigne's about the neces- 
sarily " middle " place, and rings the changes not merely upon it, 
but upon stopped and unstopped lines, with a master's audacity and 
sureness. 

Nor is this all. His merely formal improvements no doubt 
help him to attain, but by no means wholly account for, the new 
music referred to above. It has been said that the fifteenth century 
itself was strongly impressed, more strongly than the Middle Ages 
themselves, with the terror of death — that 

Timor mortis conturhat me 

was more than a mere literary catchword with it. But this mere 
terror is here changed, in English verse for the first time, to that 
greater and nobler Renaissance melancholy, the sighs of which 
served as wind to blow the organ music that distinguishes the best 
European poetry generally, and the best English poetry in particular, 
from about 1550 or later for a hundred years onwards, and the last 
echoes of which die away in the poetic prose of Browne and the 
Pindaric verse of the better part of Cowley. The Iiuiiution^ where 
Sorrow in person leads the poet to the infernal regions and shows 
him the doleful places ; the Complaint^ with its story of civil war 
and public treason and private treachery and royal ingratitude, lend 
themselves, of course, very well to the play to be played on this pipe, 
but it must be remembered that they equally well invite the mere 
doleful dulness which the poets of the fifteenth century too often 
permit themselves. Sackville is not quite so far from this in the 
Complaint^ where the difficulty of telling actual historical details con- 
fronts him, as he is in the Induciioii, where poetry has free play; 
but he is far from it in both, and absolutely at the other pole in the 
first piece. Passages in it have been made familiar by many histories 
and anthologies, but the whole of its 500 lines or so ought to be 
known by every one who desires to acquaint himself with the full 
range of tlie powers of English poetry. Campbell, whose naturally 
excellent taste was still vitiated by eighteenth-century fallacies, could 
see little in it but gloom, though he admitted its poetry. The truth 
is that the poetry should make us forget the gloom, or rather remem- 
ber it only as the vehicle, the occasion by which the poetry is exhibited. 
Sackville never lets mere "dismals " get the upper hand; it is always 
the poetry of the dismal that he keeps before us. And this is the 



CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 259 

gift that we find before perhajis only in Chaucer, the gift of making the 
subject, whatever it is, quite subsidiary — a mere cup in which to present 
to us the wine of poetry, a mere canvas on which to display its colours 
and forms. The cup and the canvas are indeed necessary ; we could 
not have the picture or the draught without them. But they are 
merely inseparable accidents : the property is the poetry. 



CHAPTER IV 

SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 

The Leicester House circle — Sidney — His life — The sonnets — The Defence of 
Poesy — The Arcadia — Spenser — The "classical metre" craze — Other poets 
of Sidney's circle — VV^atson — Greville — Warner — The sonneteers of 1592-96 

— Constable — The satirists 

The gossiping and personal side of literary Instory has always 
attracted rather excessive than insufficient attention. And it has 
naturally not been neglected in the endeavours to account for the 

sudden transformation, about the year 1579-80, of English 
Ho^use^drcl" literature from a rather dreary nursery ground, in which 

not very numerous and extremely unskilful workers were 
laboriously carrying out horticultural experiments, to a very garden of 
the Hesperides. A good deal will be found in some books about 
a certain "Areopagus" at Leicester House, the equivalent of the 
famous French ccnaclcs of earlier and later times. We must not, of 
course, make too much of this. Spenser had certainly found his way, 
if not fully, before he was ever introduced to Leicester, and there is 
little or no evidence that the Leicester House influence counted for 
anything at all in the great dramatic development. 

But the coterie just mentioned did play a part, important, though 
not to be exaggerated, in the new development. It included Sidney, 
Spenser, the future Lord Brooke, Harvey, Dyer, and others, with 

the occasional accession of notable foreigners, such as 
ney. Gjordano Bruno, and the participation of ladies, of whom 
Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, was the chief. Nor is 
there any reason to doubt that Sidney was in reality, as well as in 
position and rank, its centre and head. His genius was indeed 
inferior to Spenser's by a long way. But it exceeded that of any 
other of the members, and it is peculiarly noticeable tliat it looked in 
more directions than one. For a young man — lie was but just over 
thirty when he died — living in a time with, so to speak, no literary 
background, with no master to imitate, no blazing popularity to envy 

260 



CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 261 

and seek to share, it is no mean thing to have left the Arcadia, the 
Defence of Poesy, and Astrophel, with minor things accompHshed, and 
with a sort of tradition of established influence which is inferior to that of 
few in our literature. The tradition might have been a fond imagina- 
tion or the work of flattering parasites, but the work is there to 
support and justify it. The work may be flawed, tentative, unequal, 
but the tradition is justly to be counted in as no mean makeweight. 

Philip Sidney was born in 1554. His father was Sir Henry 
Sidney, afterwards Deputy of Ireland ; his mother Lady Mary 
Dudley, sister of Leicester and daughter of the beheaded queen- 
maker, who was for a time Duke of Northumberland. 
He gave an early example of those public-school friend- 
ships which have counted for so much in English history, with 
Fulke Greville at Shrewsbury ; but the pair were not undergraduates 
together, for Greville went to Cambridge and Sidney to Christ 
Church. But it was probably owing to Greville that Sidney, when, 
after much foreign travel, he settled in London, came in contact, 
probably about 1578, with Gabriel Harvey, and through Harvey with 
Edmund' Spenser. Sidney's heroic death at Zutphen did not take 
place till October 1586, and though his attention to literature must 
have been broken by more than one employment, he had the best 
part of ten years (for he returned from his travels in 1575) to 
work in. 

The actual achievement in his books ^ is high — much higher than 
has sometimes been allowed; but the genius of Sidney was fine 
rather than vigorous. What is most eminently remarkable in him, 
and what most justifies the reputation he achieved with his contem- 
poraries, is the extraordinary way in which his performance, under all 
its disadvantages, covers almost the whole ground, in criticism or in 
creation, of Elizabethan literature. He wrote no dramas (unless the 
juvenile Lady of May - be called a drama), and in his Defence of 
Poesy he takes what we now see (with the easy cleverness of pos- 
terity) to be the wrong side about the kind of drama to be cultivated. 
But he made no mistake about the fatal folly of Gosson's objection to- 
drama and poetry generally, and in the immortal words about 
'' Chevy Chase " he gave, all unknowing it, the motto of English 
poetry. Nay, he did more than this, for in his practice of verse, 
though comparatively scanty, occasional, and utterly unrevised, he 
indicated and essayed in many forms the lyric which was to be one 

1 There is no modern edition, I think, of Sidney's wlnole Works. Dr. Grosart 
in 1873 collected the whole Poems ; Astrophel and Stella has been several times 
separately reprinted. So has the Defence. Dr. Sommer in 1891 reprinted hand- 
somely the first edition of the Arcadia. 

2 A sort of masque, said to have been written for Elizabeth at Hampstead in 
1578, and appended to some editions of the .4rcadiii. 



262 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

of the coming age's chief exploits, and he struck the note which was 
to be the note of the poetry of tliat age generally. So too, though 
his prose consists only of the tiny critical tractate of the Defence 
and the large but rather formless romance of the Arcadia, he 
managed here also to exhibit the coming events with a wonderful 
precision of shadow. In form this prose is not great; the nearest 
approach to mere flattery in regard to him is the attempt, counte- 
nanced by no less a man than Drayton, to represent his style as a 
deliberate counterblast, to the extravagances of Lyly. On the con- 
trary, there is nearly as much '• Euphuism " in the Arcadia as in 
Ei/phncs, though it is Euphuism with a more definitely Spanish 
difference. But it is true that the Defence exhibits a much more 
sober scheme of prose ; and it is also true that in throwing the 
Arcadia into the form of the prose romance Sidney was anticipating 
by generations, and almost by centuries, the shape into which certainly 
the most copious, and some of the most exquisite, developments of 
English prose were to be cast. 

The Apology for Poetry, or Defence of Poesy, as it was successively 

named, must, from the known date of Gosson's pamphlet, have been 

composed about 1580 or the next year. The same period, during 

which Sidney is known to have made a long stay at Wilton with his 

sister, probably saw the composition of most of the 

The sonnets. ^ ,.,.,. . . . , 

Arcadia, which m its turn contains a very large propor- 
tion of the Poems. The date of the writing of the Astrophel and 
Stella sonnets is uncertain. Penelope Devereux, who was pretty 
certainly Stella, was already married to Lord Rich when Sidney 
married Frances Walsingham in 1583, but all attempts to date the 
sonnets exactly are guesswork. 

Their form is that specially English scheme in which the triumphs 
of Shakespeare were to be achieved, and which is arranged in three 
quatrains and a couplet ; while the rhyme arrangement vacillates. 
The uncertainty, however, of the period is shown in the occasional 
adoption of Alexandrines instead of decasyllabics as the base verse — 
an undoubted mistake, as the Alexandrine in English is too long a 
line to adapt itself in bulk to any complicated stave. 

Many minor details show, as this does, the immaturity of the 
writer, and the fact that he was writing, so to speak, in the dark, or 
only with the dim lights of Surrey. Wyatt, and Sackville to help him. 
But the stuff is of the best. The final line of the first sonnet — 

Fool ! said my nur.se to me, look in thy heart and write; 

the splendid soar of the opening of the seventh — 

When Nature made her chief work, Stella's eyes, 
In colour black why wrapped she heanis so bright? 



CHAi'. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 263 

the famous " Moon " sonnet, familiar from many anthologies, and 
exhibiting in the most interesting fashion the superiority of the 
opening couplet — of the first jet — to what follows; the enigmatical 
" I might," on which many hypotheses have been built ; the various 
" Sleep " sonnets, exercises in a most favourite tourney of the age ; 
the interesting 

I never drank of Aganippe's well; 

the brilliant extravagance of the " Edward the Fourth " piece ; and 
the stately music of the hundred and seventh and hundred and tenth 
sonnets — 

Stella, since thou of right a princess art, 
and 

Leave me, oh love, which reaches but to dust, — 

these things, with many others, make up a tale which in the circum- 
stances is merely astounding. The songs included in AstropJiel and 
Stella, with one exception, are a little inferior to the sonnets, but they 
are not less interesting, inasmuch as the effort to secure a lyric 
medium is obvious, and though not quite successful, is not wholly 
defeated. The heavy thud of the best work of Googe and Church- 
yard, even of Turberville and Gascoigne, is gone. We do not yet 
quite '■ sing," but we have quite got rid of the fatal drop into unques- 
tioned ''.saying." And in all Sidney's verse — the Arcadia fragments, 
the Psalm versions, etc. — this sense of the broken ice, of the fleeing 
winter, of " Lent coming with love to town " at last, is the pervading 
charm. 

The virtues of his prose are different, and have been partly 
anticipated. The Apology ox Defence (first printed as the former in 
1595) has so far an interest of style that it is in parts straightforwardly 
and vigorously written. But its intei'est of matter far outruns this. 
Gosson (see note ante) had exhibited the clash of the two cur- 
rents of the day wliich had most force in them — the scholarly and 
literary imj^ulse on the one hand, and the Puritan " craving for 
righteousness," as some call it (the intense desire to make somebody 
else uncomfortable even at a slight sacrifice to yourself, as it is 
phrased by others). Sidney, a scholar, a poet to the bone, and an 
experienced politician, young as he was, must have felt the danger, 
and may have attempted a sort of modus vivendi ; yet much of the 
Apology, in its exaltation of the classical theories, is 
merely an echo of what had been said twenty -years '^ 0/ Poesy." 
earlier by the Pleiade in France, if not of the common 
form of the Renaissance in all countries. It is unlucky, no doubt, / 
that he joins the heretics who say that verse is only an accident of 
poetry, and that he condemns that very mixture of tragedy and 



264 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

comedy which at the moment in two different countries, Spain and 
England, was raising and to raise the drama to such a height as it 
had never previously attained. But no one can be more wise than 
destiny. 

The Arcadia is, except in scale, less interesting, if only for the 
tolerably sufficient reason that it is excessively difficult to make out 
exactly how much of it is Sidney's at all. He wished, it is said, on 
his death-bed, to burn it. But his sister would not consent, and as 
The Countess of Penibroke'^s Arcadia it was published in 1590. It 
is an obvious following of the late Greek romances and the Spanish 
Ainadis series, in the spirit which was at the same time, or a little 
later, to bring forth Honor^ d'Urfd's Astrce and the enormous roll 
of French imitations. It is thus principally noticeable in scheme as 
an instance of the impulse towards prose fiction which has affected 
all ages, though it never came to anything till long after 

1\^^ Arcadia. ^. , * , , ,u t^u i • i i • ■■.-.A- i *■ 

Sidney s death. The high heroic spirit it displays capti- 
vated all good wits in its own and the following generation. But it is 
a " Tendens-hodk " rather than a book in itself, and it illustrates the 
eager striving which animated Sidney's circle with less success than 
Astrophel and Stella. The mannerisms of its style, which have 
puzzled and misled commentators, appear, as has been said, to be 
directly imitated from the Spanish. ^ 

It may be thought that too much space is given to Sidney. 
Yet his personality does seem in some strange way to have rayed 
out more influence than that of any man of his generation. And his 
positive achievement has been more often belittled than e.vaggerated. 
Indeed, if Edmund Spenser himself had died when Sidney did, and if 
nothing of his survived but what was published before that date, there 
would be poetical justification for calling Sidney the greater, though 
the less accomplished, poet of the two. 

Very little is known, though a good deal has been laboriously 

inferred and conjectured, about Spenser's parentage and his early years 

generally. There is no reasonable doubt that he was of a family of 

Spensers settled near Burnley in Lancashire ; but he was 

^ ^ '^' born in London about 1552. He appears to have been a 
Merchant Taylors' boy, and certainly matriculated at Pembroke Hall, 
Cambridge, in 1 569. He seems to have been poor, and was assisted 
from charitable funds. But if (and there can be no reasonable doubt 
of it) the translations from Petrarch and Du Bellay into English blank 
verse, which appeared in the same year in Van der Noodt's Theatre of 
Voluptuous Worldlings, and which in 1591 were, with alterations from 
blank verse to rhyme, reprinted as his, be genuine, they are evidence 

1 See p. 271 sq. of Mr. David Hannay's The Later Rcnaissauce (Edinburgh, 



CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 265 

that he was a very promising scholar. He remained at College for 
the then usual seven years, taking his Bachelor's degree in 1573, and 
his Master's in 1576. He was not fortunate enough to change his 
sizarship for a fellowship, and seems to have left Cambridge for the 
North with very dubious prospects. He had, however, made friends 
with a man somewhat older than himself, Gabriel Harvey, a Fellow of 
Trinity Hall. By 157S Harvey had, in some way or other, secured 
the patronage of the powerful favourite Leicester, and he wrote to 
Spenser to come and share his good luck. Whether, as is at least 
probable, this was the origin of Spenser's introduction to Sidney, 
Leicester's nephew, or whether, as suggested above, Fulke Greville 
had made the Cambridge literary group known to his school-fellow, is 
impossible to say, and does not matter; indeed, the two things are 
quite compatible. But Spenser was unquestionably from this 
time enlisted in the Leicester House set, and he seems to have 
been sent by Leicester to France in the autumn of 1579. Next 
year he was made secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, Deputy of 
Ireland, and with him was present at the famous Smerwick business, 
where a crew of Spanish and Papal filibusters were put to the sword, 
on the loth of November. He did not leave Ireland with Grey, but 
received various offices there, and in 1588 obtained, or rather bought, 
an allotment of some three thousand acres of the forfeited Desmond 
lands in County Cork at Kilcolman, where he proceeded to reside, 
buying also the office of Clerk of the Council of Munster. In 1589 
he went back to England, being now under the protection of another 
favourite, Raleigh. He spent at least part of two years in London, 
frequenting the Court and playing the part of suitor, not without 
some grumbling. But he obtained a pension of £^0 a year, 
a considerable sum for the time and sovereign, against, as tradition 
has it, the influence of Burleigh. Three years later, at the mature 
age of forty-two, but with poetical results worthy of twenty, he 
married a certain Elizabeth, probably Elizabeth Boyle. He went 
back again to London in 1595 ; but the end of his days was not far 
off. In 1597 he returned to Kilcolman with his wife and three, soon 
to be four, children. He became Sheriff of Cork in September 1598, 
and immediately afterwards Tyrone's rebellion broke out, Kilcolman 
was burnt, and Spenser fled, first to Cork and then to London, where, 
in January 1599, he died, there is no trustworthy evidence from what 
cause. 

Spenser's life, though the facts are scanty, is not uninteresting, and 
it is not quite unimportant to know that he shared the strenuous 
and varied living of his great time; but he might not have done this 
and yet be one of the foremost figures of English literature. His 
plans and jirojects were numerous and early; not a few of them 



266 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

seem to have been actually carried out, though no remains 
exist. But his exile in the hills of the North, though it seems to have 
witnessed an unhappy love-affair with the " Rosalind " of the Calendar, 
gave him time to exercise poetical genius. Nearly ten years had 
passed since he showed what he could do as a mere boy in Van der 
Noodt's book, when this his first real work appeared, ushered and 
commented on by one "E. K.," "from my lodging at London this 
loth of April 1579," dedicated to Sidney and addressed by the editor 
to Gabriel Harvey. 

About this " E. K." disputes have arisen. One monstrous theory 
has been started to the effect that it was Spenser in mask — a theory 
of which all that can be said is that, if it be true, Spenser, instead 
of being, as he is generally taken to have been, one of the noblest 
and most high-minded of English men of letters, was a shameless 
self-puffer. Further, the style and general tone are unlike Spenser's, 
and argue very little original genius or even talent in the writer. 
That Spenser may have supplied some of the information is very 
probable, and would not be in the least discreditable. Meanwhile 
" E. K." is identified, in fair likelihood, with a certain Edward Kirke, 
a contemporary and friend of Harvey and Spenser. He supplies a 
good deal of elaborate ushering, some not useless glossarial and o^tx 
exposition, a few comments, harmless if nothing more. If he is to be 
believed, he wrote other commentaries on works of Spenser's which 
have not come down to us. 

As for the Calendar itself, it is a collection of twelve eclogues, 
one for each month of the year, and mostly, though not always, in 
dialogue. There is no prevailing metre, the first eclogue being in 
the six-line stanza ; the second in the famous metre which, as we 
have seen, is found as far back as the Genesis and Exodus of the 
thirteenth century, but which Coleridge thought himself to have 
invented, and certainly re-invented, in Christabel ; the third in another 
six-line stanza of shorter lines ; the fourth divided between elegiac 
quatrains and a lyric stave ; the fifth in Cliaucerian riding rhyme; the 
sixth in octaves ; the seventh in the rather lolloping eights and sixes 
which the earliest Elizabethan poets had loved ; the eighth partly in 
sixains, partly in eights and sixes, treated with more freedom than 
before ; the ninth again in the Christabel form ; the tenth in a 
different si.xain; the eleventh again in quatrains and a sort of Pindaric ; 
and the twelfth in the sixains of the first. Each has at the end one 
or more "emblems" — a variety of the "posies" so much affected by 
the Elizabethans. 

The general scheme of the poem or poems was taken naturally 
from preceding eclogue-writers — Theocritus, Virgil. :'.:id the moderns. 
Mantuan, Marot, and so forth. The language (as ought to have 



CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 267 

been seen from the first, and indeed was partly) is not a natural 
dialect of any kind or district, but partly imitated from Chaucer, 
partly seasoned with Northern words. It is much cruder and more 
unskilfully archaic than the exquisite vocabulary which Spenser was 
soon to work out for the Faerie Qiieeiie, and is chiefly responsible 
for Ben Jonson's too cavalier sentence that Spenser " in imitating the 
ancients writ no language." 

The ShepJienVs Calendar ^ does not contain any of the finest 
passages of its author's poetry, but it at least shows the existence of 
an instrument on which the finest passages of poetry could be played. - 
For the next ten years Spenser was busy on other things as well 
as on poetry, and it was not till the ist of December 1589 that the 
first three l^ooks of tlie Faerie Qiieene were entered at Stationers 
Hall. They appeared in the following spring. In 1591 a volume 
containing The Ruins of Time, The Tears of the Muses, VirgiVs Gnat, 
Mother HubbarcVs Tale, The Ruins of Rome, Muiopotmos, and the 
Visions, and including, as has been said, a revision of the twenty 
years earlier juvenilia, was published. It is worth noticing that 
Spenser here for himself, as Kirke had earlier done for him, gives a 
list of promised books which never appeared. This phenomenon 
is by no means uncommon in literature, and it may be set down 
with equal probability to an active imagination outrunning possibility, 
and to a ruthless critical temper which would not allow anything 
that it did not think perfect to appear. This volume was generally 
entitled Complaints, Spenser at this time being in melancholy mood, 
and Daphnaida, which followed, exhibits the same drift. His marriage 
changed his tone remarkably, and 1595 saw the Amoretti sonnets, 
the Epithalamium, and Colin Clouts Come Home Again ; while at the 
very earliest of 1596, the completion of the Faerie Queene, except 
the odd cantos, was published, with the glorious Four Hym)is, and 
the Prothalamium, not like the Epilhalajnium on himself, followed. 
He published nothing more, his prose State of Ireland not appearing 
till long afterwards. There are no Spenserian Apocrypha worth 
mentioning, save Britain''s Ida, a pretty poem, but quite obviously 
of a later cast, in the key of the imitations of Shakespeare's two 
earlier poems and Marlowe's Hero and Leatider. 

Almost the whole of this later work (with, in the case of the 
1 591 volume, exceptions for some evidently early things not quite 
perfectly revised) stands on the same level and deserves the same 
praise. The towering bulk and the substantive interest of the Faerie 

1 The title was undoubtedly taken from a book extremely popular in divers 
lan^ua^es with the generation before — a work of astrological, medical, moral, and 
misceUaneous information, tlie early English form of which has been reprinted by 
Dr. Seiner, London, 1893. 



268 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

Queene give it the necessary supremacy among its smaller peers. 
But if they stood alone without the epic and without the Calendar, we 
should undoubtedly be deploring the unkind fate which had prevented 
the poet who gave us these from giving us anything greater. The 
1 591 volume and Daphnaida rank much nearer to the Calendar than 
the rest of the minor works ; their positive beauty is not of the 
absolutely commanding order. Yet there is a certain advance in the 
mastery of mere verse, in the faculty of communicating " cry " and 
echo. And in Mother Hubbard''s Tale there has been generally and 
rightly noticed the exhibition of a satirical faculty which is not 
subsidiary, which is complementary, to the faculties displayed in the 
Faerie Qiieene. 

But the others are of far higher quality. The Frolkalaniiiii/i for 
Lady Elizabeth and Lady Katherine Somerset is a delightful poem ; 
but it naturally lacks the personal passion of the Aviorctti and the 
Epithalainiiiin, the former the best early sonnets in final couplet form 
next to Shakespeare, the latter by common consent unsurpassed in 
its own kind, as are the Four Hymns in theirs. These poems, 
which it is very desirable to take together, express a peculiar 
Renaissance note, the union of intellectual and sensual rapture, 
as no others do. And their form corresponds to their matter. The 
poet can by this time do anything he likes with rhyme and rhythm, 
with language and metrical scheme. No bead-roll of the greatest 
poems in English, which disregards conditions of mere bulk, can omit 
the EpitJialainiujii and the Four Hymns. 

Nevertheless the Faerie (2iteene, the best known, is also the best 
of Spenser's work. In this great poem, which some have put first 
for actual greatness, and which can hardly in any competent estimate 
yield the place for charm, if not for majesty, among long poems in 
English, Spenser displays at the very full all the gifts and graces 
wliich he showed in his minor work, and more. The Calendar and 
the Sonnets, the Epit/talamiN?n and the Hymns, are but tlie chapels 
and chantries of the cathedral of the Faerie Qiieene. Rather strange 
attempts have sometimes been made to belittle the achievement, 
which is the most striking and the most pervading in the book, 
the invention of the Spenserian stanza. Some have even said that 
he "took it from the Italians," which in any sense which is not next 
to nonsense is simply false. Others have dismissed it as a simple 
putting of an Ale.xandrine on to the eight-line stanza. The fact is 
that it is one of the crowning achievements of poetical inspiration in 
form. It stands alone in the combination of individual beauty and 
faculty, with suitableness to a long connected poem. Naturally, and 
it might seem inevitably, the latter quality is found in nearly all 
verse forms to exi,st in inverse ratio to the former. The Spenserian 



CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 269 

almost alone combines the two ; and while the single stanza is often 
as complete and as beautiful as a sonnet, the whole flows with an 
evenness and absence of break which not the most ingeniously 
arranged "sonnet-sequence " has ever attained. 

The poet's success in language is certainly more contestable ; 
but not much diminution can be allowed in the credit due for it. 
The extreme and sometimes rather i^ugged archaism of the Calendar 
has been smoothed away, and Spenser's immense advance in melody 
at once makes it easy for him to select only beautiful words, and un- 
necessary for him to carry archaism beyond a slight degree. It is 
but now and then that there would be any difficulty in printing a 
stanza of the Faerie Qiieene in modern spelling without a single strange 
word, though no doubt the poet sometimes sees his account in using 
licenses both in vocabulary and spelling. 

With such a metre and such a lexicon marvels in verbal music 
become almost easy. Hardly any two stanzas of this enormous work 
will be found exactly to repeat each other in cadence. The secrets 
of varying the caesura of the line and of using or abstaining from 
enjambemcnt or overlapping, which have been by turns ignored, re- 
covered, and abused, and on which rests practically the whole art 
of rescuing any metre from monotony, were perfectly well known to 
Spenser, and as cunningly used by him as by any of his followers. 
Nor can he be said to be ignorant, though he employs them rather 
less, of the other two great metrical secrets, the use of trisyllabic 
feet and the distribution of words of varying weight and length over 
the line. 

As for subject, Spenser's was a great one ; and it was capable, 
even in his own time, of being regarded from curiously diverse points 
of view. Half told as the tale is, it is impossible to be certain how 
far Spenser had a fixed plan of adjusting the whole to that slightly 
concealed allegory of the state of England which, though too much 
attention may be paid to it, the poem does contain. There was more 
than the mere courtiership of the time in the obvious glances at 
Queen Elizabeth, not merely in Gloriana, but in Belphoebe, and 
perhaps to some extent in Britomart. We may wish that there were 
less colour for the hint of Leicester in Prince Arthur, and of Queen 
Mary in Duessa, and it may seem rather idle curiosity to inquire 
whether Artegall really has anything to do with Lord Grey of Wilton, 
where Raleigh comes in, and so forth. There can, however, be no 
doubt that there is a certain amount of double meaning of the kind, 
that it interested contemporaries, and that it was intended to lead up 
to some sort of end. Indeed, the general story of the chief characters, 
though very slowly and with vast overlayings, does make some prog- 
ress even as it is amid the completer historiettes of the adventures 



270 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 



of the several Kniglits of the Virtues, and the ahiiost bewildering 
panorama of beautiful pictures which the poet calls up at every step, 
and wliich no doubt constitute the main interest and delight of the 
poem to modern readers. 

To Spenser, moreover, as to all the great men of his great genera- 
tion, virtue and vice were not commonplaces in any sense that ad- 
mitted of their being despicable or negligible. By a redoublement 
of his allegory — not so much the allegory, which had not yet entirely 
relaxed its very tyrannous hold on the later Middle Ages, as that 
which must always maintain its grasp on poetry — the Faerie 
Queetie was also intended to be a picture of Life, of Conduct, worked 
out by the treatment of certain great Virtues or excellences. Holiness, 
Temperance, and Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy are 
celebrated in the books actually existing. Magnificence, in the full 
Aristotelian sense (though he must rather have meant Magnanimity), 
was intended, we learn, at once to provide the special subject of 
another, and. as exemplified by Prince Arthur, to appear in and 
dominate them all. But of the actual distribution of the last six 
books no tmstworthy testimony remains, and only tradition vouches 
for the fact that they, or some of them, perished in the sack of 
Kilcolman. Only the odd "cantos of Mutability," intended to be at- 
tached to a book of Constancy, survive ; and as they are not 
inferior (they contain the gorgeous procession of the Months and 
Seasons) to the very best of the earlier work, it is pretty certain that 
what we have lost would be no disappointment if it were found. 
Indeed it is, for many sound reasons of poetical criticism, extremely 
probable that Spenser proceeded on the plan of indulging his genius 
by the composition of great fragments such as this, and, instead of 
hastily cobbling up a context, left them till he could worthily work 
them into the larger whole. 

It is not true that sucli passages, thougli they are not perhaps 
very difficult to identify and separate nowadays, form the sole or 
even the chief attraction of the poem. On the contrary, they are 
never so beautiful as in their jjroper places ; and the Faerie (Jtiecne, 
more than almost any otiier poem, demands and deserves to be read as 
a whole if its full charm is to Ije comprehended and enjoyed. But 
there is no reasonable doubt that the accessories of Spenser's scheme 
have become of more importance in poetical ajjpeal than those things 
which to him were perliaps the chief. We shall never, if we are wise, 
forget that he is, as Milton called him, " our sage and serious Spenser," 
but wisdom will still insist that we regard him first of all as the poet 
and prophet of Beauty — the beauty of heaven and of earth alike. 

This is perhaps the best place to notice a strange craze already 
referred to, which seems at one time to have been in danger of 



ciiAi'. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 271 

seriously infecting Spenser — the projected '"reform" of English verse 
by the production of actual classical metres, especially hexameters. 

This was a general and, strange as it may seem, a not quite unin- 
telligible mania of the Renaissance generally, and had been tried in 
other countries besides England. The reason of it is perfectly plain. 
The eager spirits of the day in both France and England 
had outgrown the good old verse of their respective metre" craze! 
nations ; they thought (and rightly) that the recent 
verse was not very good, and being as yet novices in comparative 
criticism, they jumped to the conclusion that what they justly 
admired in Greek and Latin poetry might be reproduced, or at least 
rivalled, by the use of an identical prosody. It was certain that such 
a learned body as the Sidneian clique would at least not reject this 
notion ab initio, and for a time it seems to have received a favourable 
hearing there. Ascham, a delightful prose writer but of a most un- 
poetical turn, had advocated the thing long before, and a certain 
Thomas Drant, a contemporary of Ascham's, had left certain post- 
humous "rules" on the subject. 

This mania was taken up, either from crotchet or sincerely, by 
many inside and out Sidney's circle, including the meritorious critic 
Webbe {z'ide infra), and by none more than by Gabriel Harvey, 
who had become Fellow of Trinity Hall. Harvey is one of those 
intrinsically unimportant persons who by accident have acquired a 
very considerable place in literary history ; and there have even been 
tierce battles over the question whether he was a pedant or not. If 
not it is very difficult to know to whom the adjective can apply. 
He was a genuine scholar in his own way — pedants very often, 
though not invariably, are. He deserves much thanks for the way 
in which he put Spenser in the way of a preferment which enabled 
him to follow his genius instead of languishing as a poor scholar or 
hiding himself away as a country curate. It is not so certain that 
Harvey was wholly to blame for the distaste which he shov/ed to the 
London Bohemian school, which will be .shortly noticed ; the great 
INIarprelate dispute in which he was mi.xed up is still so mysterious in 
parts that it is very difficult to form any but the most guarded judg- 
ment on any matter connected with it ; and it is certain that his 
principal literary antagonist and reviler, Thomas Nash, was at least 
as unscrupulous as he was clever. 

But Harvey is condemned out of his own mouth. It is not Nash 
but himself who informs us that he thought the Faerie Qiieene — the 
greatest poem that English literature had yet seen but one, if with 
tliat exception, and the greatest poem save three or four, if with 
tliese exceptions, that English literature was to see — a fantastic trifle, 
much inferior to nine pseudo-classical '' comedies," probably some- 



272 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 



thing like Daniel's later ones, which Spenser had also written, and 
which lie had the good sense never to print. And again it is not 
Nash, nor any one who trusts to Nash, but Harvey who tells us that 
he believed in the hexameter craze, tliat he exemplified it in many 
preposterous examples, and that he tried to force it on his contem- 
poraries. 

It is not certain how far Spenser himself was seriously carried 
away by this lunacy. Some have seen nothing but irony in the 
somewhat guarded and fair-spoken replies which he makes to Harvey 
on the subject, and it is certain that his own attempts in the style 
are few and rather laboriously ineffective, with a touch of genius in 
them, than hopelessly mad and bad. But we may perhaps see in his 
attitude rather that of an honest perplexity striving to adjust itself to 
what his elders and betters seemed to like, but convinced of their 
error by native genius, than any deliberate pcrsiflai^e. 

At any rate, he did little in the kind. Others were less wary, 
and Richard Stany hurst, an Irish gentleman, achieved one of the 
most preposterous books of English literature in his version of Virgil. 
Nor did the craze die soon. It was formally revived after some years, 
and with some differences, by an exquisite poet in true English verse, 
Thomas Campion, and formally denounced by a true though less 
exquisite poet, Samuel Daniel. It animated, as we shall see, the 
interesting if limited body of Elizabethan critics. And the echo of it 
may be found long afterwards in Milton's curious heresies about 
rhyme — heresies which may be set down in part to an innate genius 
for blank verse striving to assert itself, but which, seeing that Milton 
could write as beautifully in rhyme as without it, may be more safely 
imputed to the singular cross-grained ness, the innate nonconformity, 
which mark the author of Paradise Lost in almost every relation of 
life and literature. 

Besides Sidney, Spenser, and their gracioso Harvey, the Leicester 
House circle included divers other men of letters. Sir Edward Dyer, 
a very great friend of Sidney's and one of the pall-bearers at his 
funeral, but an older man, has the accidental interest of 
Sidney's clrcle*^ having been born at Sharpham Park in Somersetshire, 
the birthplace nearly two centuries later of Fielding. 
He was an Oxford man, a traveller, a diplomatist and courtier, and 
he outlived Elizabeth, dying in 1607. He had a very great reputa- 
tion in his time as a poet, but his remains are small, and only one of 
them, the famous and excellent, but not superexcellent, 

My mind to me a kingdom is, 

has obtained much place in the general memory. Abraham Fraunce, 
a protege of Sidney's, was a Shrewsbury boy and a Fellow of St. 



CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 273 

John's College, Cambridge. His name occurs with fair frequency in 
the literature of the time, and he appears to have been a good 
scholar, but the most interesting thing about him is that he quoted 
tlie Faerie Qtteeiie two years before it was published. 

More important than. Dyer, and much more important than 
Fraunce, was Thomas Watson, a rather short-lived bard who died in 
1592 at the age of thirty-five, but who, save for a certain frigidity, 
would take a high place, and who perhaps, considering 
his earliness, deserves no low one as it is. Watson,^ 
who was a Londoner ioy birth and an Oxford man by education, 
translated the Antigone into Latin in 1581 ; but the next year he pro- 
duced an English verse book of great mark, the Hecatompathia or Pas- 
sio)tate Century of Sonnets. This, it is important to observe, was the 
very first of the great Elizabethan sonnet-collections, for Sidney's, though 
written, did not appear till years afterwards, and it was the tenth, not 
the ninth, decade of the century which saw the regular sonnet out- 
burst. Watson was dead before this, but after his deatli another 
sequence, the Tears of Fancy, made its appearance, and he did 
other work. 

It is just possible that if Watson had lived a little longer (though 
he was outgrowing the ripest poetical age when he died), or if he had 
been born a little later, the frigidity above referred to would have 
been melted. It appears to be the result, not so much of any want of 
natural heat in the poet, as of his mind being somewhat sicklied o'er 
with learning. As was the case with all these early Elizabethan poets 
of the great age, except Spenser, he could not wear this learning lightly, 
and he hardly dared use a phrase or form a wish if somebody Greek 
or Roman, somebody French or Italian, had not authorised the pro- 
ceeding. That the sonnets of the Hecatotnpathia are not quatorzains, 
but a long eighteen-line form, of a class which the Italians had 
wisely rejected, does not matter much. The form is not so successful 
as the quatorzain, but neither Watson nor anybody else could tell that 
till he had tried it. It is more fatal that each piece has a prose 
commentary and discussion of itself, pointing out its originals and its 
special features, with parallel passages and all the most approved 
apparatus of classical editing. The Tears of Fancy are couplet- 
tipped quatorzains, after what is the specially English model ; but 
they do not gain much in freedom. Perliaps nowhere do we feel, 
so much as in reading Watson, the enormous benefit which was 
conferred upon English literature by the lawless excesses of the 
playwrights — some of them, Shakespeare at their head, men of no 
University culture at all. 

It cannot be said tliat the last (and except Spenser and Sidney 
1 Ed. Arber. 



274 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE T(J SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

by far the greatest) of this set who remains to Ijc noticed offers any 
exception to this caution. Fullvc Greville,^ wlio was exactly Sidney's 
contemporary, was born at Beauchamp Court, Warwick- 
shire, in whicli county liis father represented a good 
family, while his mother was of the illustrious house of the Nevilles. 
He and '• Astrophel " entered Shrewsbury together, and though they 
were parted during their University sojourn, the friendship continued, 
and the two served together, when they were twenty-three, on an 
embassy to the Palatinate. Greville was heir to great wealth, and 
increased it by buying lucrative offices. He was a favourite of the 
Queen — who, no doubt, did not like him less because he seemed to 
have no fancy for marriage. He was knighted in 1597. 

At the opening of the new reign, Greville, who had already 
received many gifts from Elizabeth, had Warwick Castle, which has 
remained with his descendants, bestowed on him. In 1614 he be- 
came Chancellor of the Exchequer; and in 1620 was ennobled as 
Lord Brooke of Beauchamp. Eight years later he was, it is said, 
stabbed by a servant in his house, the name and site of which are 
perpetuated by Brook Street, Holborn. In his youth he seems to 
have been the friend of most of the best men of his time from Sidney 
to Bacon ; in his age he appears, though not certainly, to have acquired 
a character for avarice and moroseness. Almost nothing of his 
considerable work was published during his lifetime, the chief 
exceptions being the play of A/iisiap/ia, 1601. Some of his poems 
appeared in 1633, his Life of Sidney in 1652, and more poems in 
1670. He was tlnis a practitioner in all three kinds, poetry, prose, 
and drama, and it is jjroljablc, though not certain, tliat his best work 
was early. 

The plays MitstapJia and .ILiliaiii, whicli could not possibly be 
acted, show the influence of tlie coterie in their form, which is that 
of the Senecan drama chiefly, and have a double portion of that 
special characteristic of Greville which will be noticed presently, as 
have his longer poems or poetical tractates on Monarchy and other 
things. But Ccelica is one of the earliest, and certainly one of the 
most remarkable, of the fashional;le sonnet and song collections to a 
real or imaginary mistress. Some of the tilings in it are purely 
delightful, the best of all being that beginning 

I, with whose colours Myra dressed lier head. 

But as a rule deliglit, excejit of a very peculiar kind, is not the 
sensation which Greville is apt to excite. Like Donne, his junior by 
some years, though with less exquisite exceptions to the rule of his 

1 Works, cd. Grosart, 4 vols, privafcly printed, 1870. 



CUAi'. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 275 

incompleteness, he is an example at once of the immense capability 
and of the desperate dangers of the Elizabethan cast of thought, and 
(till the dramatists had broken down man}' of its trammels) of the 
Elizabethan conception of literature. Greville would not write for the 
vulgar, and, as has been seen, he scarcely condescended to give it 
any opportunities of judging his work. From first to last there seems 
to have been on him a sense that literature ought above all things 
to be scholarly in form and elegant in substance, that it ought not to 
deal with trivial things, that "words to the wise," cryptic raptures, 
enigmatical sentences, were the things to attempt. Not merely the 
" abstriiser cogitations " in verse, in which Lamb had perhaps a 
slightly paradoxical though no doubt also a genuine delight, but his 
simplest prose works, exlubit this characteristic of laboured remoteness 
as do hardly any other things in English. In verse he is eccentric, 
unpopular, impossible, but not uncharming. 

A few individual poets and two interesting groups of poems have 
still to be noticed as properly contemporary with Spenser, Shake- 
speare and Drayton and Daniel being kept for later treatment. The 
chief of the former was William Warner, a poet who 
had his resurrection rather too early, and who perhaps 
on that account (he figures in Chalmers's Poets i) has had rather less 
attention than he deserves. Warner, who was probably born in 
1558, and certainly died in 1609, was born in Oxfordshire and 
educated at Oxford, became an attorney, attached himself in some 
way to Lord Hunsdon, perhaps translated the MencccJuni, and 
certainly wrote Albioii's Eiiglajid, 1586, and Syrinx, 1597. The 
latter, a collection of prose stories, is not of much importance ; 
Albion's England has a good deal. At first sight it falls distinctly 
into the earlier and ruder class, being written in fourteeners, which, 
however, the poet did not divide, as his only modern editor has for 
convenience' sake ruthlessly divided them into eights and sixes. It 
anticipates Drayton and Daniel ; and it shows some similarity to 
Spenser, not in its verse, but in its attention to the history of England ; 
while it has a further likeness to Drayton in trying to do for the 
history very much what the Folyolbion does for the topography of 
the island. There is little of the new learned grace or of the new 
passion about the thing; but it has many vivid touches, some pas- 
sages of rhetorical force, and a geiieral sense of power. 

The poets other than Warner, with two exceptions, were not better 
executants than himself, and were much smaller men. Thomas Howell, 
an outsider of the Sidneian group, who wrote from 1568 to 1581 things 
almost sufficiently designated by their titles, — The Arbor of A/nit ie, 

1 Vol. iv. 



276 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH inc. v 

liis Devices, etc., — belongs to a lower division of the same class with 
Turberville and Googe. Humphrey Giffoid, whose Posie of Gilly- 
jUnvcrs appeared in .1580, has much more original force, could do the 
Ijallad measure well, has a spirited war-song, and some skipping 
anticipation of the N^yinphidia measure. Much below either is 
Matthew Grove, whose poems were published in 1587, but must 
have been written somewhat earlier. Yet the care which has been 
expended in reprinting these ^ is not lost, because nothing can be more 
valuable than to have, at such periods as these, specimens of the 
ordinary run of verse. When such verse comes to be written, as in 
our own time and in others, by hundreds of volumes every year, it 
ceases to possess this interest altogether, and, except in the case of 
some singular cataclysm, is not likely to recover it. But some would 
except from these remarks the pair above referred to — Richard 
Barnfield (1574-1626) and Robert Southwell (i56o?-i595). The 
former,'- a Staffordshire squire, wrote not a little, but liis memory is 
chierty attached to The Affectionate ShepJieni (1594), an amatory 
poem of classical or Italian rather than English inspiration, some 
otliers of no very dissimilar character, and one exquisite thing, the 
famous 

As it fell upon a day, 

which used to be ascribed to Sliakespeare. Southwell,^ a Jesuit priest, 
who was imprisoned and executed as a traitor, has also, but more 
certainly, left one splendid poem, The Buniing Babe, and other re- 
ligious pieces, which, in spirit if not in form, are much above the 
average. 

The two groups which have been referred to above as necessary 
to complete the survey of poets strictly contemporary with Spenser 
are the sonneteers and satirists. Both, in their close connection with 
each other, and in their apparent adoption of fashionable styles, show 
that immaturity which is still characteristic of the time ; each in 
different ways shows that time's abounding faculty. 

It is not possible to decide with absolute certainty what induced 

the sonnet outburst of the last decade of the sixteenth century in 

England, and especially of its middle years. The form — " non moins 

^, docte que plaisante invention italienne," as Du Bellay 

sonneteers calls it — was no novelty in the colder climes of England 

of 1592-96. ^j^j France; it had taken both by assault nearly two 

generations earlier with Wyatt and Mellin de Saint-Gelais. But it 

is perhaps the best testimony to Sidney's real importance in English 

literature, that it was not till after his death, and till his sonnets 

lAll three appear in Dr. Grosart's Occusioiial Issues, 
•■i Ed. Arber. 3 Ed. Grosart. 



ciiAr. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEAirOKARIES 277 

were gradually divulged, that the sonnet outburst came. There was 
no mistake about it when it did come. Sidney's poems became 
known to the general in 1591, and the earliest form of Constable's 
(see below) next year. In 1593 appeared three remarkable collec- 
tions, wholly or mainly in sonnet form, the Partheiiophil and 
Part/icnophe of Barnabe Barnes, the Licta of Giles fletcher, and 
the Phillis of Thomas Lodge. ^ Lodge will reappear as a satirist, 
as a dramatist, and also as a pamphleteer. The chief achievement 
of Fletcher is to have been the father of two poets better than 
himself; and the sonnets of neither are very remarkable, though 
they testify to the powerful influence in the air. Barnes, though he 
did other work in i:)rose and verse (a Treatise of Offices, a Divine 
Century of Spiritual Sonnets, a play called the DeviVs Charter^ 
must stand or fall by Parthenopldl. It has been variously judged, 
and can never by a sane judgment be set extremely high, seeing 
that the author has no measure and would sometimes be much 
the better for having some. But it is a good specimen of the 
poetical intoxication of the time, which contrasts so curiously with the 
unintentional sobriety of the Googes and even the Gascoignes.- 

These pioneers of the sonnet seem to have encouraged followers, 
for the next year, 1594, was very fertile in similar books. William 
Percy, a cadet of the house of Northumberland, and an Oxford 
man, published Coclia (the trick of framing the set of sonnets as an 
address to a real or feigned mistress established itself at once). 
Two major poets, Drayton and Daniel, who will have separate notice 
later, issued, the first Idea, the second Delia. An anonymous 
collection, Zephcria, has not only intrinsic merit, but is one of the 
few Elizabethan books which represent very strongly and directly 
the French Pleiade influence. Willoughby's Avisa (nothing is 
known of Willoughby or of Avisa, but the book has been drawn 
into the Shakespearian comment-vortex), though not formally consist- 
ing of sonnets, belongs to the group in other ways. But this group's 
most characteristic constituent was the fuller form of Constable's 
Diana. 

We know a very little more about Henry Constable ^ than about 
most of the interesting and obscure personages of the time ; but we 
do not know very much. He was probably of the distinguished 

1 All these, with most of those to be mentioned presently, except Zephcria, 
are in Dr. Grosart's Occasional Issues. Several, including Zephcria, are in Mr. 
Arber's English Garner. 

2 Barnes's birth- and death-dates are unknown. He was a friend of Gabriel 
Harvey's, and, as Harvey's friends were wont to be, much mixed up in the literary 
asperities of the time, being for instance bitterly lampooned by Thomas Campion. 
But we have no real knowledge about him. 

3 Poems, ed. Hazlitt, London, 1859. 



27S ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

family of his name, which is still seated in the Holderness district 
of Yorkshire; he may have been born about 1554; he seems to 
have taken his degree at St. John's College, Cambridge, 
in 1579; and he was a friend of the Bacons; but he 
was a Roman Catholic, and as such, inevitably a member of an 
Opposition, which in those days was exposed to things more 
unpleasant than mere exclusion from office. How he can, as some 
say, have formed part of Queen Mary's household in Scotland is 
not clear, seeing that he cannot have been more than fourteen at the 
date of the battle of Langside ; but he certainly spent much of his 
middle life in exile abroad ; and when he revisited England towards 
the end of the Queen's reign, he was thrown into the Tower, whence 
he only emerged after James's accession, and then not at once. He 
is supposed to have died before 161 6. His verse was very highly 
esteemed by his contemporaries. It consists of the twenty-eight 
sonnets (twenty-two only had been printed in 1592) of Diana, 
the title of which, if it be necessary to seek any special oiigin for a 
thing which might have had so many, was probably suggested by 
the famous Diana of Montemayor ; of another thirty or more, obtained 
from MS. on profane, and some seventeen on spiritual subjects; of 
four prefixed to Sidney's Apology when it was printed, and of four 
contributions, not sonnets, to EnglauiVs Helicon. The note of the 
whole of this work is a remarkable elegance and scholarly perfection, 
less " translunary " perhaps than the brightest comet or rocket 
effects of Elizabethan poetry, but steadier, more sustained, and in 
correcter taste. 

Alcilia, by "J. C." in 1595, contained sonnets by name which 
are as far from the sonnet nature as those of Avisa, but which are, 
as verses, sometimes pretty, tliough usually slim. And 1596 made 
up for tlie comparative sterility of its predecessor by giving not 
merely Spenser's admirable Ainorctti, but three cycles by persons 
of whom next to nothing is known, Fidessa by Bartholomew Griffin, 
Diclla by Richard Lynch, and Chloris by William Smithi Fidessa 
is the best of the three. Robert Tofte added Laura in 1597. and 
Alba in 1598. The general characteristics of these sonnets will be 
best given in the Interchapter summarising this Book. But the 
poetic impulse which they show was diffused over all the later years 
of the reign, and it is not least well shown in the last and best of the 
Elizabethan Miscellanies, England''s Helicon (1600) and Davison's 
Poetical Rhapsody ( 1 602 ) . 

The tendency of the Elizabethans to write in schools, and after 
for some time neglecting a model that lay before them, to copy it in 
flocks, is only less exhibited in the curious group of satires which 
coincided with the sonnet outbreak. Wyatt, if he had not quite 



SrENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 279 



hit, had gone very near to, the regular satire form, and Gascoigne 
had actually achieved it ; but their examples for a time produced no 
effect. It is still very uncertain what credence is to 
be attached to a MS. ascription of Donne's Satires to satirists, 
a date as early as 1 593 ; and Donne's work will be best 
treated together and in the next Book. But Lodge, so often 
mentioned, and to be mentioned, most certainly issued A Fi'jt^ for 
iMo/nns, satirical in substance and in form couplets, as early as 1595 ; 
which makes the challenge of Joseph Hall, afterwards Bishop, to 
" follow him who list. And be the second English satirist," a piece of 
rather ill-tasted jactation. Hall published his Virgidemiaruiii in 
1597, and was followed by Marston the dramatist with Satires 
accompanying his PygmaliofCs Image in 1598, and Tlie Scourge of 
Villainy in 1599. Guilpin's Skialet/ieia, Tourneur's Transformed 
ATeiamorp/iosis, and a few other things belong to the same school 
and nearly the same date.^ 

It is a school not to be contemned if we look at its members ; less 
estimable, perhaps, if we look at this particular division of their 
works. Almost all are tainted with a very great coarseness, and 
injured by a singular and still not quite intelligible harshness of 
verse, which is most plausibly explained as coming from a corrupt 
imitation of Persius. Tlie satire, like satire generally, has some 
value for its picture of manners, especially in Hall and Donne ; but 
even this is vitiated by an obvious and rather tedious exaggeration 
both of tone and detail, which reaches its acme in Marston, as 
obscurity of thought and phrase does in Tourneur and roughness of 
versification in Donne. 

1 Donne's and Marston's satires are in all the editions of their work; Hall's 
arc in Dr. Grosart's Occasional Issues, as is Skia/et/ieia ; the Transformed Aleta- 
viorphosis is in Mr. Churton Collins's edition of Tourneur. 



CHAPTER V 



THE UNIVERSITY WITS 



The general drama of 1570-90 — The University "Wits — Lyly — His plays — Peele 
— Greene — Marlowe — Kyd — Lodge — Nash — Their work — Its kind in 
drama — Its vehicle in blank verse — Peele's plays — Those of Greene, Lodge, 
Nash, and Kyd — The lyrics of the group — Marlowe's plays 

The liistory of the English drama during the particular stage of 

evolution which preceded its fullest development is, except in one 

well-defined and interestingly peopled section, not so much difficult 

rj,, , as impossible to trace. We have seen how the dramatic 

I he general 1 

drama of vvork even of a person who stands out from the common 
1570-yo. ]^Qi-(\ sf) niuch as Stephen Gosson is (though it would 
have been to the interest of the actors and poets whom he deserted 
to publish it) entirely lost. We know that the " Marprelate " con- 
troversy {vic/c next chapter) was actually brought on the stage in the 
Armada year or thereabouts, and the fact that, as we should expect, 
the play was instantly stopped, does not entirely account for, still 
less reconcile us tOj the loss of the piece. Above all, it must have 
been at this time, that is to say in the years between 1570 and 1590, 
that the early chronicle-plays and others which Shakespeare honoured 
by selecting them as the canvases or palimpsest parchments for his 
own work first saw the light and the boards. But such remnants as 
we have of these plays are almost invariably of later date in their 
existing forms. 

For the disappearance of this transition vvork more than one 
cause, probable a priori if not certain historically, is usually and 
reasonably assigned. Not only were the plays wanted for acting, not 
reading ; but it was in the first place the clear interest of the rival 
companies, strolling or fixed, to keep their repertoires as much as 
possil)le to themselves. Further, the constant demand for novelty 
by audiences, and perhaps also the operation, in a different form, of 
the just-mentioned wish to keep a monopoly, seem to have led to 
the working up from time to time of old favourite pieces with new 

280 



CHAP V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 281 

material, either by members of the company or poets specially 
retained. The variations which (to take examples both from the 
beginning and end of tlie seventeenth century) we find between the 
quarto and folio editions of Shakespeare's Ha>/ilcf, between the quarto 
and the folio of Dryden's and Uavenant's adaptation of the Tempest, 
show in the case of known men, who had an interest in keeping 
their work in some form, what must have happened in the case of 
unknown men, who were usually botching up, for a few shillings, matter 
which had not come to be regarded with even the smallest literary 
interest. 

Towards the close of this twilight period, however, we come to 
a group of dramatic work produced by known or at least named 
persons (for our positive knowledge of most of them is extremely 
small), distinguished from the doggerel of the inter- 
, hides and the starclied sterility of the early blank verse ^j^ wil" 
plays by the presence in almost all cases of considerable, 
and in one or two of all but the highest, gifts, and exhibiting a very 
interesting community of circumstance, equipment, and even definite 
literary aim. All these men were probably, and all but one or two 
were certainly, of University training, an advantage less uniformly 
possessed by their immediate successors. For once the centre and 
source of a great literary movement in England was what it ought to 
have been — the two Universities. Not indeed that in all cases the 
various sets which fostered, and the various schemes which carried 
out, the literary developments of the time were actually formed at 
Oxford or at Cambridge, though there is reason to believe that in 
most cases they were. But the vast majority of the distinguished^-i 
writers of the time (Shakespeare, it may be remembered, is not early) 
were University men ; their friendships, which in the eager discussion 
of literary novelties always play so great a part, were in many cases 
University friendships ; and it is notorious that the mighty group of 
playwrights who founded the English drama were called, not quite 
amiably, by the players who employed and rivalled them, "University 
Wits."i 

In this honourable function Cambridge had a little (though not 
so much as very pardonable partisanship has sometimes endeavoured 
to make out) the priority and the predominance. Thus Harvey, the 
"regent" (in scholastic and French sense at least) of the Areopagus 
or Sidneian coterie, was a Cambridge man, and so was Spenser ; but 
Sidney himself was of Oxford. Of the great early dramatic group 
Marlowe, Greene, and Nash were Cambridge men, but Lyly. Peele, 

1 The locus classiciis for all this is The Rctitrii from Pari/assiis, an extremely 
interesting set of three plays, first completely printed by W. D. Macray (Oxford, 



282 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

and Lodge were Oxonians, as Greene himself subsequently became 
by incorporation. But there is no need to urge tliis controversy. 
fthe important point is that both the Universities did now begin to 
play, and played as they never quite have done since, their proper 
part in the national literary life. The reasons for this are not diffi- 
cult to find, but they are interesting. The conversion of monastic 
property, and the shutting up of chantries, monasteries, etc., as 
outlets for private benevolence and piety, had made the founding of 
colleges, and of grammar-schools, the feeders of colleges, more than 
ever popular. The climbing of the secular clergy on the ruins of the 
regular, the permission of marriage to them, and their close con- 
nection with the collegiate system, established perhaps the happiest 
coml)ined scheme of education and professional subsistence that any 
country has ever had — a scheme existing nearly untouched till our 
own day, when it was rashly upset. The various forms of new learn- 
ing made the Universities interesting, not least owing to their con- 
tests with the old ; the gradual opening of professional careers to 
laymen gave outlet and promotion from them ; and if the demand in 
this way for clever graduates was not so great as now, it was in- 
creased in a way not now open by the institution, bad or good, of 
great men's households, alDOut which young men of education and 
promise were wont to hang in a fashion, vague and now not quite 
intelligible, but certain as a matter of historic fact. 

The oldest of the University Wits, though an outsider of the prin- 
cipal group, was probably John Lyly, and he deserves first mention 
nt)t merely for this double fact, but because his chief literary perform- 
ance (to be mentioned in the ne.xt chapter) was, though 
^ ^' not in drama, considerably anterior to most of their 
work. Altliough we do not know very much about him even in his earlier 
dates, while his later are quite obscure, our knowledge is full and 
clear when compared to the " blanket of the dark" which surrounds 
such names as those of Kyd and, later, Dekker. Lyly was a man of 
Kent, and must have been born somewhere about 1553. He went 
to Oxford, his college being Magdalen (where he was probably a 
demy), took his degree in 1573, and tried a year later to obtain a 
fellow.ship through Cecil's interest. In the spring of 1579 he took 
his place once for all, though with an interval of obscuration, in 
English literature by Euphiics (7'ide iii/ra), and in the same year 
was incorporated at Cambridge. He furnished Thomas Watson 
{vide suprii) with a letter commendatory in 1582, and between 1584 
and 1594 (in the first year at least he was still battelling at Mag- 
dalen) furnished the Revels with nine plays, acted by the choristers 
either of the Chapel Royal or St. Paul's. These are Cai/ipaspe, 
Sappho and FJiao, Endy/nion, Galatea, Midas, MotJier Bo/nbie, the 



THE UNIVERSITY WITS 283 



IVoman in the Moon, the MaiiVs MctaiiiorpJiosis (?). and Love's Met a- 
inorpliosis. A dismal petition to the Queen in 1593 sums itself up 
in one of its clauses: "Thirteen years your Highness's servant and 
yet nothing." After this we know nothing of him positively, and 
even the entry wliich is supposed to be that of his death in 1606 is 
only connected with him by guesswork, for "Lyly" (Lilly, Lillie, 
etc.) has always been a common enough name, and there is little 
identification in "John." 

Lyiy's plays,^ like his person, stand quite apart from those of the 
rest of the group, with which they have nothing in common except 
the strong classicism, the presence of " University wit," the striking 
breach with the old tradition of horseplay interlude or ^^. , 

, , , ..,.,., . His plays. 

wooden tragedy, the exquisite lyric which sometimes 
diversifies them, and their influence on the greatest dramatist of the 
next or any age. Written not for the public stage but as court 
amusements (or "abridgments," as Theseus would say), they have 
a good deal in common with the Masque. The very marked, not to 
say conceited, style and the strong, almost bitter, satirical spirit 
which appear in EupJiues are also visible. But tlieir most interest- 
ing historical characteristic is the way in which, uncertainly and 
tentatively, they strike out the way of Romantic Comedy, the most 
arduous and least frequently trodden of all dramatic ways, but when 
trodden successfully the way to the rarest and choicest of dramatic 
paradises. We must not say that if there had been no Endyjnion 
and Woman in the Moon there would have been no Midsummer 
N'igJifs Dream and no As You Like It. But we may say boldly 
that before As You Like It and A Midsummer Nighfs Dream it is 
vain to look for anything of their special quality elsewhere than in 
Lyly. 

At all events the difference between these plays and those of the 
other members of the group is most remarkable, and lies not merely 
in individual genius but in kind. The whole scheme and texture con- 
trast with the vast majority of the work from Peele to Shirley. They 
come nearer to the antique form of the Interlude, though with little 
or none of the crudity of this. Endymion is a euphuistic allegory, 
where the loves of the hero, of Cynthia, and of Tellus, themselves but 
a shadowy centre or canvas, are fringed nvith humours more shadowy 
still. The accepted story of Campaspe and Apellcs is treated in the 
same manner; while those of Sappho and Galatea form mere start- 
ing-points, from which the author diverges in directions not at all 
warranted by what may be called his authorities. It is much the 
same with Midas., while in the three last certain plays (the Maid''s 

1 Ed. Fairholt, 2 vols. London, iS^S. 



2S4 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSgR'S DEATH bk. v 

Metatnorphosis ^ is not at all like Lyly) the writer trusts his fancy 
almost entirely, weavinrj, for instance, in tiic Woman in t/w Moon, 
out of the myth of I'andora a satire on woman, only suggested, and 
that in a most modern fashion, by the originaL In short, the 
dramatic element in these plays is more than shadowy, it is phantas- 
magoric; and the form does hardly more than serve as vehicle for 
the author's glittering, if somewhat cold, fancy, his melancholy satire, 
and the poitii-de-vice spruceness of his tyrannically mannered style. 
He " sits a little apart," like Claverhouse in Wandering Willie^s Tale, 
and there is nothing in him of the " dancing and deray" of the rest. 

Of these George Peele '^ was slightly the eldest. He seems to have 

been of a Devonshire family, but may have been born in London 

about 1558. He was at any rate a Blue Coat boy and a member ol 

Broadgates Hall (later Pembroke College) at Oxford, 

''""'*'■ where he took his degrees — B.A. in 1577, M.A. two years 
later. Peele remained even longer than the customary seven years 
at Oxford, and seems to have only left it on his marriage, when he 
went to London and at once fell among the literary set. But he 
did not break his connection with his University, and in 1583, having 
already distinguished himself as a playwright, superintended the 
production of Gager's Latin plays at Christ Church before Prince 
Casimir. In the same year he contributed commendatory verse to 
Watson's Hecatonipathia. Next year appeared his Aj-raignnient of 
Paris, a sort of masque which had been written for the children of 
the Chapel Royal to play before the Queen. In yet another year, 
1585, he was charged by the City with the disposing of the Lord 
Mayor's pageant, then no vulgar thing. 

These details are not otiose, because, though they cannot be 
said positively to disprove, they do not by any means fit in with, the 
tradition which makes of Peele a Bohemian reprobate, who died of 
debauchery and lived as a sort of the vulgar Villon in London taverns. 
The former scandal is due to a gibe of Francis Meres, the egregious 
person who spoke of Anthony Munday ^ as our best plotter (though 
there was possibly a gibe in this too) ; the second depends almost 

1 This piece (which is not in Fairholt's edition, but will be found in the first 
volume of Mr. BuUen's Old Plays, London, 1882) is in couplets chiefiy, whereas 
Lyly mostly affects blank verse or prose, and has been thought, with some prob- 
ability, to be an early work of John Day. 

2 Ed. Dyce, in i vol. with Greene (London, 1885) ; ed. Bullen, 2 vols. 
(London, 1888). 

» Munday (1553-1633) was one of the busiest literary hacks of the time, a 
playwright, a constant botcher-up of pamphlets about crimes and executions (he 
had brought .ihoMt some ot the latter as an ex-Jesuit seminarist and informer 
against Jesuits), and a voluminous, but according to Souihey unfaithful, trans- 
lator of the Spanish Romances of chivalry. 



CHAP. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 285 

wholly on an apocryphal farrago of stories, most of them centuries 
older than Peek's time, called the Jests of George Peek or George 
" Pyeboard " (a play on the name). There is absolutely no known 
fact in the case except a letter of Peek's to Burleigh in 1596 (two 
years before, according to Meres, he died), which letter pleads 
poverty and sickness. It is possible for a man to be poor and ill 
without debauchery being the cause of either inconvenience. 

Indeed, much of the stuff which has been talked about the loose 
lives of this group of men of letters may be brushed away here in 
litnine. It has been most insufficiently remembered — first, that the 
Puritan party, then growing always stronger and more unscrupulous, 
stuck at no libels against everybody and everything connected with 
the stage ; secondly, that quarrels and jealousies between men of 
letters, unfortunately, have not been unknown to any age ; thirdly, 
that the appetite for scandal in readers and the quest for " copy " 
in writers were not checked or corrected by any exact and regular 
attestation of fact. " Crowner's quests " were known, but it may be 
suspected that they were very irregularly held ; there was no regular 
system of police, still less any of medical inspection, registration of 
deaths, and the like. In short, though there is no evidence justify- 
ing us in regarding the life of the University Wits in town as a 
pattern of morality and self-restraint, the evidence to the contrary is 
of the flimsiest and most suspicious description. In any case, Peek 
suffered less from it than either Marlowe or Greene. 

Of this famous pair Greene, the less gifted, was the older. His 
birth-year is not known, but he may have been as old as Peek and 
can hardly have been born later than 1560. At any rate, he was 
admitted at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1575, and 
took his degree four years later. He subsequently not 
only proceeded M.A. in his own University but was incorporated as 
such at Oxford. Meanwhile he had travelled in Italy and Spain, 
and on his return to England in 1580 had launched one of the 
so-called " Pamphlets," which will be dealt with in our next chapter, 
or rather he had obtained a license for it. For almost exactly a 
decade, from 1582 to 1592, he seems to have lived in London (for the 
attempts to identify him with a Robert Greene who during part of 
tlie time was in orders and held a living are quite gratuitous), and he 
certainly died in the year last named. For some time before his 
death he had been engaged in writing a series of pamphlets, some 
of which appeared posthumously, and one of which, the Groat'' s-ivorth 
of Wit, contains a famous passage about his friends and Shakespeare, 
or at least " Shakescene." These purport to be dying speeches of re- 
pentance from a man who was conscious of an evil life and wished to 
warn his friends. They were taken at more than the letter by others, 



286 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

and a legend, due mostly to Gabriel Harvey, grew up of Greene's 
having died of a surfeit of '' pickled herrings and Rhenish," and of 
his having lived in disreputable associations for some time previously. 

The Greene legend is still less lurid than that of Greene's greatest 
companion. Christopher Marlowe was of rather lower social status 
than Peele and Greene, both of whom seem to have been sons of per- 
sons of some position. His father was a shoemaker at 
Canterbury, a clerk of St. Mary's church there, and a free- 
man of the city. The poet was born in 1564, and at the age of seven- 
teen, after earlier education at the King's School of his native place, 
entered Benet (Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge. Perhaps he was 
Tiprote'gc of the Chief Baron Manwood, a Sandwich and Canterbury 
magnate, on whom Marlowe perhaps wrote a Latin epitaph. But all 
these things are uncertain, and some of them share the uncomfortable 
doubts thrown on the trustworthiness of John Payne Collier. At 
any rate Marlowe (whose name occurs in the original documents in 
varieties — Marly, Marlen, Marlyn, and so forth — unusual even for 
that age of orthographic license) took his B.A. rather soon, in 1583, 
and his M.A. about the usual time from matriculation, in 1587. He 
must have gone immediately to London, for Tainbiirlaine was produced 
in the same year, or even in 1586, though it was not produced or 
published under his name. His career was extraordinarily short, and 
except from the legend we know nothing of it, while even the closing 
fact that he was stabbed in the eye by a certain Francis Archer in a 
tavern at Deptford on i6th June 1593, the blow being given by 
Archer in self-defence, is partly legendary, and the slayer's name is 
sometimes given as Ingram. Further, the occasion of the quarrel, 
if it has any evidence at all, rests on an allusion in a satire of 
Marston's, which has absolutely no verification. Further yet, some 
of the unlucky persons who have grubbed up every wretched docu- 
ment al)out our great men of letters of this time have unearthed an 
information by a person named Bame, who was afterwards hanged 
at Tvburn, charging Marlowe with disgusting vices, with loathsome 
blasphemy, and with the most offensive brag and chatter about both. 
It is not sentiment but a sound feeling which has led all true scholars 
to take refuge in the magnificent eulogy of Drayton, who must have 
had abundant knowledge, and who was no milksop, though we know 
that he held aloof from the Bohemianism of the gutter. 

This nauseous form of gossip fortimately gathers less about the 

rest of our group. Of the birth, fortunes, and deatli of Kyd next to 

nothing is known, though he may have been the Thomas Kyd who 

was at school at Merchant Taylors' after October 1565, 

^ ' and so peHiaps a scliool-fellow of Spenser's. Of Lodge 

and Nash we know a little more, but of the first even legend has 



THE UNIVERSITY WITS 287 



nothing grimy to say, and of the latter not much. Both were named 
Tliomas. Lodge was the son of a Lord Mayor and went to Trinity 
College, Oxford ; while that he took to literature early 
is shown by his answering Gosson, vide supra, 1579. It 
is tliought that he was probably then about man's estate. He for some 
years pursued the way of play, poem, and pamphlet. But by a fortu- 
nate chance, which may partly account for his escaping the snares of 
London, he went to .sea with Cavendish in 1591, and on his return, 
though he at first settled down to the old literary round, he seems to 
have soon had enough of it. He turned to medicine, took degrees 
at Avignon and Oxford, became a Roman Catholic, and died in 1625. 

Nash, the last of the group, was also the youngest. He was born 
in 1567, the son of a minister at Lowestoft, and entered St. John's 
College, Cambridge, as a sizar in 1582, when Greene had already 
made, and Marlowe was just about to make, a reputa- 
tion. He died in the year of the century, at the age 
of only thirty-three, having lived apparently rather a stniggling than 
a jovial life, having stoutly defended his friends (he left Cambridge 
in 1589, and therefore had time to know Greene and Marlowe), having 
done much rather ephemeral but vigorous and interesting work, in 
prose chiefly, and having repented with a repentance not open to the 
suspicion which besets that of his master and model Greene. He 
had perhaps the l east g enius of all the set, but he had abundant 
talent, and was even more than any of them a type. 

But it is time to pass from the lives of these men, so little known, 
so idly chattered over, so unimportant excejjt to themselves, to their 
perennially important and interesting work. The constituents of this 
have been summed up above — phiy? poem, pamphlet. 
From Marlowe <and Kyd we have no pamphlets ; from 
Lodge very little play; from Nash not very much more, and hardly 
any non-dramatic verse worth speaking of. But the three classes 
were in this or that way the work of all. The prose will be dealt 
with in the next chapter ; the non-dramatic verse — save in the case 
of Marlowe's He?'o and Leander, and the exquisite lyrics which most 
of the group with unpremeditated, certainly with unimitated, art 
could pour forth — is not of much importance. "The play's the 
thing" with the group as such. 

The devotees of explanation have wearied themselves over attempts 
to get at the origin of this play. Perhaps it cannot be got at. Dickens, 
with all his genius, was not a very literary person, and yet he settled 
the riddle of literary history once for all in his account of 
the origin of Pickwick. "I thought of Mr. Pickwick," ^'draml'" 
he .says; but how he thought of Mr. Pickwick he does 
not tell us ; probably he could not have told. It will be enough 



2S8 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH isk. v 



for the wise that to some man or some group of men in England 
somewhere about 1580 the kind, blended as usual, of English 
play suggested itself. It is related to the older developments of the 
interlude; it is related to the classical play; it is still more closely 
related to the curious subvariety of that play which was achieved in 
Nero's time by Seneca the tragedian, which afiected all Renaissance 
Europe with so strange an influence, and which, as has been told 
above, had been already introduced into English. Kyd, one of the 
group, translated Coniclie, the most Senecan of the great Pleiade 
dramatist Garnier's imitations of Seneca. All his companions, it is 
clear, were students of Seneca. Fortunately, however, what ultimately 
attracted them most in this enigmatical writer was not the regular 
but the irregular side of him — not the stately iambic and the correct 
construction, but the lyric exxursions of the chorus, the frequent 
tendency to the introduction of ghosts and supernatural agencies, 
the "blood and thunder," the bombast and tlie rant. It may seem 
a singular thing to give critical thanks for these last. Yet, so far as 
it is possible to decide upon such matters, it is practically certain 
that the period of violent fermentation for which these things served 
as yeast did actually give us, and to all appearance was needed to 
give us, the strong wine of the completed and perfected drama for 
some thirty or forty years after Marlowe's death. The earliest 
Elizabethan theatre had many faults, but the worst of them is its 
terrible flatness and woodenness. The drama of the Marlowe school 
may be called, if any one pleases, " a barbaric yawp " ; but it is, at 
any rate when it is characteristic, never wooden and never flat. 

Nobody ever innovates all at once and all of a piece ; and it 
would have been something like a miracle if all of this drama had 
been characteristic. On the contrary, a good deal of it approaches 
the older stamp, and this may be particularly said to be 
biank^vel^se'" the case with the work of the two eldest of the group, 
Lyly and Peele, though both informed it with far 
greater literary gifts and accomplishments than any earlier dramatist 
except Sackville had had it in him to show. This may be due, not 
\nerely to their age, but to the fact that, as has been said, both 
catered rather for court and other similar pageants than for the 
rough appetite of the popular theatre. But both did work strikingly 
good, and Peele much more than Lyly exhibits proficiency in that 
strange new vehicle of dramatic blank verse which is the triumph 
and glory of the school, which practically gave us Shakes])eare, and 
which in isolated examples was fashioned — by Marlowe especially, but 
also by more than one other member of the school — with a majesty 
and music never since surpassed. 

This is one of the points in which Lyly stands apart. He has 



CHAP. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 289 

blank verse, but it is of a different quality, and by far the greater part 
of his plays is in prose, — the natural instrument, though he could 
disport himself charmingly in lyric, of the author of 
Eiiphiies. Where blank verse appears, as in The IVoinan ^^^" 

/;/ t/ie Moon, it is noticeable that the play is late, and that the fashion 
of the verse has nothing in it very individual. Peele, if Sir Clyonion and 
Sir Clamydes be really his, wrote at least one play in the old fourteener 
which had been so popular, and which, as Shakespeare's Love''s 
Labour s Lost, to take no other example, shows, retained its hold upon 
writers and hearers pretty late. This play, which may be called a 
romantic interlude, — it has a " vice " and two or three allegorical 
characters besides Alexander the Great, the two knights, queens, 
princesses, etc., — is of great interest, marking as it does an experi- 
ment in transition. The very early Arraignment of Paris is part 
in fourteeners and in heroics, part in blank verse. Edward I. — a 
play which has been rather unnecessarily reviled, because it adopts a 
popular ballad-scandal against Eleanor of Castile — has prose, blank 
verse, and doggerel. The Old ll'ives^ Tale, which, in more ways than 
one, comes close to Lyly, is in prose with blank-verse passages. The 
Battle of Alcazar and David and Bethsabe are in blank verse only. 
Taking these facts together, combining with them that of Peele's 
seniority to Marlowe, and then examining the texture and quality of his 
blank verse itself, we may probably assign to this writer the chief 
originating impulse in the great change which the group impressed 
upon the poem. His own, though it never attains to Marlowe's 
" might," is much sweeter than Marlowe's usual strain, and perhaps 
more equably good. He has not discarded all the tricks which we 
noticed in Gascoigne, being still fond (though not to the extent of the 
Steel Glass) of beginning batches or arrangements in verse with the 
same or nearly the same phrase. He has not quite emerged from 
the tyranny of the stopped line, though he seldom or never allows 
his feet to stump with the wooden tramp of Gorboduc. But he has 
learnt modulation, variety, cadence, and occasionally he can even 
soar — the best gift that this group discovered in the unrhymed deca- 
syllabic. It would be hard to find, in any author born earlier, such 
a "tower" of verse as in this speech of Tamar, which yet is not one 
of Peel%'s stock beauties — 

Cast, as was Eva, froiMihat glorious soil, 

Where all delights sat bating, winged with thoughts 

Ready to nestle in her naked breasts, 

To bare and barren vales with floods made waste — 

To desert woods and hills with lightning scorched, 

Where 1 death, where 1 shame, where ^ hell, where ^ horror sit. 

1 The original has " with," but " where " is clearly needed. 
U 



290 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 



And he is sometimes almost Miltonic (Milton was a student of Peele) 
in such ''carryings over" as — 

My sister Thamar, when he feigned 
Sickness. 

In fact, tlie blank verse of Peele would repay a far fuller study than it 
is possible to give it here. 

The minor members of the group are less remarkable in this 
respect. Greene,- especially in his best play, Friar Bacon ami Friar 
Bungay, succeeds occasionally in imitating both the soaring and the 

fluency of Peele ; but, as a rule, he is still somewhat too 

Greene, much addicted to the stopped line. Lodge, an agreeable 

^^°^se. Nash, pj-Qge writer and a charming lyrist, suffers still more 

from this old fault in his only known unassisted play, the 
Pl^oiciuis of Civil IVar. Nash, a great pamphleteer, has but two plays 
to his credit, of which Dido is known to be partly the work of Marlowe, 
while great part of IVill Siuiuncr''s Testament is in prose, and the 
blank verse not merely shows a constant tendency to drop into 
couplet, but has no very distinct quality even when it is pure. Kyd, 
tlie last of the group, is much more important than any of these as a 
playwright. But Jeroniino, if it be his, constantly lapses into 
couplets ; the Spanish Tragedy shows something of the same 
tendency as well as much of the stopped line ; while the enormous 
speeches of Cornelia, overmastered by the monotony of their French, 
original, succumb with too much regularity to the same malign 
influence. 

But side by side with the faculty for blank verse, all the poets 
hitherto mentioned have a lyric gift which certainly ought to have 
suppled and inspirited their ''blanks," and perhaps did so. The 

universally known " Cupid and Campaspe " of Lyly is 
onht'jroup. oi^ly °"^ °f ^^^ """^^^ regular, by no means of the 

most charming, of the songs scattered about his plays ; 
and here as in other respects Peele is even more than his compeer. 
Circcne's lyrical work, which is fortunately obtainable- separately 
from his very inaccessible prose and not too common theatre, contains 

1 His dramatic works, A Lookiii^s^- Glass for London (the history of Nineveh 
written with Lodge), James the Fourth of Scotland (quite unhistorical), Alphonsus 
of Arraj{o//, etc., will be found with Peele as cited above. His complete works in 
]Mose are only accessible in Dr. Grosart's " Huth Library." The plays of Lodge 
and Kyd are in Hazlitt's Dodslcy. 

2 Dyce has included the poems in his edition of the plays, and there is a 
volume of Bell's Poets which gives Greene's poems with Marlowe's. Bell's Songs 
from the Dramatists, as well as, above all, Mr. Bullen's Lyrics from Elizabethan 
Romances and Lyrics from Elizabethan Dramatists, will also supply the texts for 
this paragraph. 



CHAP, v' THE UNIVERSITY WITS 291 

nothing so exquisite as the best of these two men's work or of 
Lodge's ; but is more abundant, has a little less the character of the 
mere snatch, and seldom or never sinks below a level more than 
respectable. As for Lodge himself, it is in pure poetry, not in drama 
or in prose, that he can make his safest claim to a high position in 
English literature. His famous madrigal, "■ Love in my bosom like a 
bee," nearly the most charming specimen of a charming kind, then 
popular, is very closely approached by others of his achievements. 
Kyd and Nash seem to have had their lips less touched to song ; 
and Marlowe's taste does not seem very frequently to have inclined 
him to the lyric, though another world-renowned example, "The 
Passionate Shepherd," shows what he could do when he chose. But 
his great contribution to poetry other tlian dramatic was the still 
more '' passionate " narrative of Hero and Leaiuier, which ranks with 
Shakespeare's Juvenilia, and if it lacks the range and amplitude 
which, even at this early time, distinguishes the work of Shakespeare, 
exceeds them in intensity and flame. 

In Marlowe ^ himself the mighty line is so closely associated with 
the whole spirit and tendency of his drama that we cannot but take 
them together. We have from him, besides the work just mentioned, 
and some translations of Ovid and Lucan, seven plays 
— the two parts of Tajiiburlaine, Doctor Faust its, The ^^pliy^'.^'^ 
Jew oj Malta, Edward the Second, the Massacre at Paris 
and Dido. The two last are the weakest, and contain little which 
we can feel sure that others niay not have written. Of the remain- 
ing five Edward the Second is a regular chronicle-play, aiming at 
some unity of construction ; the other four romantic tragedies of the 
wildest kind. In the two parts of Tajidnirlaine the conqueror, in- 
vincible in fight, insatiable of bloodshed, and hardly human except 
by his love for his wife, " divine Zenocrate," sweeps slowly past, 
regardless of all power and life and majesty but his own, trampling 
on Bajazet, putting man, woman, and child to the sword, "show- 
ing" the virgins of Antioch "death" at the point of his lances, and 
only worsted by Death himself, who carries off first Zenocrate and 
then the tyrant. There is here no central action, only a dissolving 
series of scenes of terror and blood ; no character except the dim and 
gigantic one of Tamburlaine. If the poet's imagination were of a 
less grandiose magnificence, or if he were not able to interpret it to 
us by the unsurpassed splendour and majesty of his versification and 
jjhraseology, the thing would be simply dull. The scale is too vast, 
the personalities too vague, even to excite lively and poignant terror. 
It has not even "the fierce vexation of a dream," only the chaos 
of one. 

1 Ed. D}'ce in one volume ; ed. BuUen in three. 



2y2 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH i;k. v 

This cannot quite be said of the Jew of Malta. Barabas, the hero, 
is very much more of a person than the huge and shadowy figure of 
Tamburlaine, and the action is concentrated, or at any rate confined, 
within a much more manageable area. But the illimitable, the apeiroit, 
of Marlowe's imagination, intimates itself, for good and for evil, here 
also. Although the procession of the Jew's crimes is almost as little 
artistic as that of Tamburlaine's triumphs and butcheries, the 
intensity of the poet's personification of hatred and avarice and quasi- 
religious jealousy makes it far more alive. Yet perhaps no play 
makes us feel so acutely and distinctly the difference between Marlowe 
and Shakespeare, even if we take for comparison such possibly 
doubtful and certainly early and immature work as Titns Andronicits. 
Aaron has not received the touches which make lago and Richard, 
Shylock and Macbeth, what they are. He has .still much, and too 
much, about him of the mere horror-mongering which is characteristic 
of this middle stage of our drama, and he is, of course, much less 
magnificent than Barabas. But lie is also much more of a human 
being. 

Although it is among the most chaotic, tliere can be little doubt 
that Doctor Fanstiis is the best of Marlowe's plays. For the chaos 
here is not quite out of keeping with the wild theme ; and that theme 
itself, in every other respect, is absolutely suited to Marlowe's genius. 
The whole spirit of the Faust story comports with — nay, positively 
requires — not so much a regular dramatic action as a pliantasmagoria ; 
and its separate scenes are, most of them, well suited to stimulate the 
towering imagination, the passionate fancy, the tameless and restless 
energy of this wonderfully though partially endowed poet. That the 
Helen passage and the death scene contain, with the single exception 
— if with that — of the great purple patch of Tainbiirhiine, as to "the 
pens that poets held," the most exquisite outbursts of sheer poetry in 
Marlowe is no more than we should expect from the coincidence 
of inspiring quality in the subject and formal competence in the 
worker. 

Edvi'ard the Second falls sliort, for the complement of the reason 
which makes Faust us so eminent a success. The history-play is not 
extremely exigent of order or of unity ; but to be good it must have 
something of both. Now order and unity were what Marlowe could 
never give. Nothing is more natural than that the foully-wronged 
Queen Isabel should transfer her affections to Mortimer. But 
Marlowe either cannot or will not take the little trouble necessary to 
bridge the interval whicli separates the loving and even forgiving 
wife from the rancorous adulteress. It might have been a little more 
(lifllcult, l)ut it was certainly feasible, to project the character of 
Edward liimself so as to render the awkward facts credible and not 



CHAi>. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 293 

disgusting. But here again Marlowe does not so much as attempt 
it. The petulant and unmanly fribble of the first acts might have 
passed into the tyrannical and arbitrary prince, the not unwarlike lord, 
of the middle, and he in turn into the almost majestic victim of the 
end. But " the flats are not joined," and the magnificent speech — 

Leicester, if gentle words might comfort me, 

sounds utterly out of place in the mouth of the abject to whom we 
have been earlier introduced. 

Yet in Marlowe two things never fail for long — the strange, not 
by any means impotent, reach after the infinite, and the command of 
magnificent verse. He may, as I have said, have learnt something 
of this latter from Peele, and he seldom approaches his master in 
sweetness, while he has some of the tricks of the whole school — the 
constant and sometimes very irritating habit of making the characters 
speak of themselves in the third person, the still too great tendency 
to stopped lines, and the like. But the weight and splendour which 
he impresses on his best passages made them famous at once, and 
have kejit them so, except during tire period when all these good 
things were forgot. 

And what is true of Marlowe eminently, of Peele in a not much 
lower degree, is true of the whole group, save perhaps Nash, who is 
only a poet and dramatist by accident. They all intend greatly ; 
choose great subjects ; handle them, if sometimes with an almost 
childish want of common sense, yet with poetic imagination and 
creative force ; make them the occasion of passages distinguished by 
verse of a splendour and momentum, if less often of a lightness and 
easy movement, never previously known in English. For anything 
that resembles the echoing thunder of the best decasyllabics of these 
poets (not by any means of Marlowe only) we must go back to the 
hendecasyllable of Dante, to the hexameter of Lucretius, to the choric 
phrase of yEschylus, and there is no fourth parallel in any language 
before them. Their contemporaries might sometimes gird at the 
" drumming decasyllabon." But the rub-a-dub of a drum is a 
curiously weak and inappreciative simile for the sound of the line of 
Marlowe, even for that of Peele and Kyd, of Greene and Lodge. It 
much better deserves one suggested by the words of that poet and 
critic of our own who has best appreciated it — 

The thunder of the trumpets of the night. 



CHAPTER VI 

LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, PAMPHLETEERS, 
AND CRITICS 

Ascham's prose —Defects of the type — The ebb and flow of style — Euphuism — 
Kiiphucs — Euphues,thc Anatomy of Wit — Euphiics and his England — Their 
style— Its ancient instances — Its vernacularity — Its unnatural history — 
Hooker — Contemporaries of Lyly and Hooker — The translators — Their 
characteristics — The pamphleteers — Martin Marprelate — The critics 

The prose of the great period of Queen Elizabeth's reign is one of 
tlie most interesting divisions, historically speaking, of all English 
prose. We left that medium of expression some years after the 
Queen's accession in a state which was best indicated by 
^pros^'^ the work of Ascham, the principal prose-writer by far of 
the time, and one who embodied its dominant charac- 
teristics. The period of mere tentative, of experiments in stocking 
the vocabulary and arranging the syntax, had ceased, experiments in 
all directions had been made in point of subject, and at length a 
fairly normal style had been attained, suitable, as Ascham himself 
showed, for a good variety of literary purposes, if not for all. 

" fairly," it has been said, but by no means finally. The style 
of Ascham was a pretty good style of all work ; but it was not 
capable of distinction in more than one or two kinds. It was per- 
fectly clear, very fairly advanced in balance and cadence, 
VhlType.'^ and possessing yet further capacities in that direction, 
well-proportioned, logical, and sane. But like the later 
plain prose style of the eighteenth century, it had two drawbacks. 
It was very ill fitted for fanciful, gorgeous, or passionate expression, 
and it was constantly liable, when not used with something more 
than ordinary scholarship and taste, to degenerate into tameness, 
commonness, insipidity. In its horror of "inkhorn" terms, it was in 
danger of becoming dull ; in its adherence to Latin arrangement and 
to certain stereotyped, or likely to be stereotyped, tricks of parallelism 
and antithesis, it was in danger of losing raciness and vernacular 
variety. 

294 



CHAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 295 

Attempts to variegate it were certain, and they have been traced 
with more or less probabiHty, or fancifulness, in the transition writers 
between 1560 and 1580. But these tendencies were carried so much 
farther, and the ideas which lay behind them were so much more 
brilliantly and importantly expressed in the famous book called 
Eiiphnes, that it is really unnecessary to look behind that, except in 
making a special study of the particular subject. And even such a 
study might perhaps wisely avoid cumbering itself too much on the 
question whether Lyly's original is to be found through Berners in 
Guevara, or elsewhere, or in many elsewheres, or nowhere. The law 
of maxuna and iiihiitna is more certain and constant in prose style 
than almost anywhere else. When the elements of such a style 
have been once got together, florid or plain style (it does not much, 
or at all, matter which) appears, and is in its measure and degree 
perfected. As it approaches perfi^ction, men get tired of it and try 
something new, plain or florid, as the case may be, which .^j^^ ^^^^ 
in its turn rises, flourishes, decays, and is stiperseded. and flow 
At hardly any time (though there are a few apparent ° ^'^ ^' 
exceptions) does either flourish quite alone ; in hardly any case can 
the innovation, whatever it is, be directly traced back to any single 
case or beginner. Flux rules all, and we can only note with any pre- 
cision the greater turns of the tide. 

Euphuism was certainly one of these. Like most things, it has 
been exaggerated as well as depreciated in importance, and objections 
have been taken to this or that use of the word — especially to the 
habit of employing the term generally, as well as specifi- . 

cally. This seems hypercritical. EiipJuies was the first 
conspicuous example in English of the determination to achieve an 
ornate, variegated, and rather fantastic style ; and it is quite reason- 
able to allow the employment of the abstract terms formed from it as 
denoting, first, the specific characteristics of the book itself, and, 
secondly, in the usual transferred fashion, those of the genus to which 
it belongs, and which renews itself so constantly in species, with only 
minor differences. 

The life of Lyly has been already (p. 282) dealt with, but this 
book 1 preceded his plays. He was probably about six-and-twenty 
when its first part, Eiip/uies the Anatomy of Wit, appeared in the 
spring of 1579. He was certainly still resident at Ox- 
ford, and an address to the " Gentlemen Scholars "of 
that University appeared in the second edition, which followed 
within the year. The second part, Euphues and his England, ap- 
peared next year (1580), and both were rapidly and frequently 

1 Ed. Arber, London, 1868. 



296 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

reprinted. The influence of the book has been sometimes a little 
exaggerated, and sometimes more than a little pooh-poohed, while 
from a period tolerably early in the seventeenth century to the middle of 
the eighteenth it was forgotten, and from the middle of the eighteenth 
to the middle of the nineteenth misrepresented. But there is no 
doubt at all that for at least twenty years after its first appearance, if 
not for thirty or forty. Euphuism was a living, an active, and in the 
usual way and with the usual limitations, a triumphant force. Almost 
the whole of the more literary art of the curious pamphlet literature 
of the time followed it ; it coloured, at least as much by direct imita- 
tion as by indirect revolt, Sidney's equally influential Arcadia ; it had 
a very great influence on the dramatists, especially Shakespeare him- 
self in his youth. This history guards most carefully against the 
undue interchange oi post and propter ; and we might have had, we 
should doubtless have had, Donne first and Browne later, with all 
the gorgeous language and quaint thought of which the two are the 
chief representatives in verse and prose, without Lyly. But in that 
case Donne and Browne, and all those about them, would have had to 
do for themselves something that, as it was, they found done to their 
hand. 

It is necessary (and it has not always been done) to keep the 
matter and intention of Lyly's work separate from his manner. In 
the first point he was no innovator, and though it would not be 
correct to say that he was behind his time, he was not more than on 
a level with it, and was nearer .obsolescence than innovation. His 
book is, in drift and thought, exclusively a Renaissance one ; it is 
concentrated ujwn Education, and takes that view of Education 
itself which the Renaissance derived from Plato, and conditioned with 
its own thoughts in politics, religion, art, and what not. Nominally 
EiipJuies is a romance. Its first part, EupJmcs, or the Anatomy of 
Eiifihucs ^^'^^ opens at Naples, and treats of the courtship of 
the Atiatpmy the heroine Lucilla by the two friends, Euphues and 
of Wit. phii.-xutus — the Amadis and Galaori mutatis mutandis 
of the story — and by a third suitor, vastly inferior to either, named 
Curio. In all Lyly's work (whether for reason or not, we have no 
evidence) there is a deep and heartfelt satire on woman, which quite 
transcends the mere stock railing of the Middle Ages ; and Lucilla, 
of course, chooses the unfittest. But the bulk of the book is not 
story at all, and is made up of various letters of Euphues, the longest 
being one to Philautus after he has quarrelled with his friend for 

1 These contrasted (serious and light-o'-love) wooers of the great Portuguese 
of Spanish romance, themselves slightly altered copies of Lancelot and Gawain, 
juoduced an immense effect on the Renaissance, and were reproduced by hun- 
dreds of authors in different forms of poem, romance, and play. 



CHAi'. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 297 

Lucilla, and she has jilted them botli ; an orthodox dialogue 
between Euphues and '•• Atheos," the latter a person rather rife at 
this time ; and, above all, a very important tractate entitled '* Euphues 
and his Ephebus," which is based on Plutarch''s treatise of education, 
and contains a great part of the real gist of the book. This includes a 
rather sharp criticism of the condition of things at Oxford, to which 
Lyly plays '' Terrae Filius " a hundred and fifty years before Nicholas 
Amhurst, though not from the political point of view. 

Euphues and his England lands the hero and Philautus in the 
author's own country, and after a short time at court. In this part 
Philautus is the chief actor. He pays his addresses to a certain 
Lady Camilla, a court beauty, who is unkind, and is, by Eufiiuus 
the favour of another. Lady Flavia, permitted a platonic and his 
friendship with her niece Frances as "his violet," which "j^^"« 
at the close of the book seems to give promise of being turned into 
something warmer. Meanwhile Euphues, after another cjuarrel with 
Philautus, withdraws himself first to study generally, and then, after 
eulogies on the ladies of England, Cecil (Lyly's patron), and the 
Queen, to the mountain Silexedra (" Flint-seat," in party Greek- 
Latin), whence the subsequent pamphleteers occasionally evoked his 
forlorn and somewhat priggish eidolon. 

The really noble aims and the somewhat romantic, but by no 
means unsound, views of love and life and learning which the age of 
Elizabeth held would hardly have saved this curious book from the 
fate of manv others not far its inferiors in such respects, ^„ . 

T T 1 1 1' 1 • • 1 11 iheir Style. 

it Lyly had not been a great mannerist in style, as well 
as an active practitioner in thought, and if his style had not looked 
forward instead of backward, or at least merely at the present. It 
is evident that he was utterly discontented with the plain classicalised 
style of the Cambridge school. He was as classical as any of them, 
and he borrowed from them (or more probably from their originals) 
the practice of balanced sentences, in which some critics have 
erroneously seen his chTeT title to mention in the history of English 
prose. Here he was simply in the direct succession : he started 
nothing new as compared with Ascham or even Fisher. The point 
in which he was a pioneer, by which he caught the ear of the rising 
generation, and by which he has earned his real place in the story, is 
quite different. It is his revolt against the plain style, and the 
special means which he took for arming and enforcing that revolt. 

These were two, or it may be three, which shall be mentioned in 
the order of their departure from the practices common before him. 

The first and by far the least original was a peculiar fashion 
of bringing in classical examples as similes or illustrations Such 
examples in themselves had been commonplaces of the whole Middle 



298 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

Ages, and had come thicker and faster in the fifteenth century and 
the early Renaissance. But Lyly used them with a difference. 

" Bucephalus lieth down when he is curried," says he, 
Vifstaiices.' p^vssing ovcr as known already the ancestry and birth of 

Alexander, his campaigns, his death, and a few particulars 
about his successors, which the genuine mediaeval taste would have 
thought excusable, nay, desirable, at this juncture, while even writers 
like Brandt and his translator Barclay would have thought it sinful 
to dismiss Bucephalus in less than a paragraph or stanza. 

The second, in which he innovated a little more, though 
still he had numerous forerunners, was the introduction — by way of 
contrast, to enforce his meaning, or for other reasons — of distinctly 

vernacular phrases, " I am of the slioemaker's mind who 
vernacularity. careth uot SO the shoe hold the plucking on." Such 

phrases, as we noted, are not uncommon in Ascham him- 
self; but they are much more frequent in Lyly, who in tliis respect 
is as Ascliam and Latimer rolled into one. To which head may be 
added his practice in alliteration — -a common one, as again we have 
seen, at the time — but in him far commoner, and far more of a 
deliberate artifice of style than with most. 

Yet here again we may say that had there been nothing else than 
this in Enphiies, it had never attained the position it held and, after 
a long period of eclipse, now again holds. Its real differentia, its 

real quality, lies elsewhere, and under a third head, 
^'^'istory"^' ^^^'^^ ^^ *^^^ extraordinary similes drawn from all heaven 

and earth, but especially from the fanciful zoology of the 
Middle Ages, which it is hardly possible to open two pages of 
Eiiphiics without discovering in greater or less abundance. 

The usual efforts have been made to show that this curious and 
salient feature is not entirely original, and may be found before Lyly. 
No doubt it may ; no doubt any feature of any writer, except the last 
and highest strokes of the individual genius, may so be found, while 
even these strokes are sometimes only the result of slight changes 
on precedent matter. It is quite legitimate, if not supremely im- 
portant, to indicate, in this writer and in that of the third quarter of 
the century, the symptoms which are premonitory of every literary 
change, and therefore of this. But what entitles writers to a con- 
spicuous place in the story of literature is their use for the first time 
on a large scale, and with striking effect, of certain means to attain 
certain ends. Lyly was undoubtedly the first to lavish this peculiar 
kind of simile and illustration, especially with the definite end of 
heightening and variegating his style, so as to produce on the reader 
a distinct rhetorical effect, to make the common uncommon, to pro- 
duce style in and for itself, manner independent of matter. Before 



CHAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER— THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 299 

Lyiy, as we have seen, there had hardly been any one of whom this 
could be said, except Fisher, and Fisher's means were as different 
from Lyly's as was his aim. 

We do not know that Lyly deliberately and consciously set 
himself against the princijjles which Ascham and his set had 
enunciated thirty years earlier, and which they or others had faith- 
fully carried out ; but that the opposition was in effect diametrical is 
certain. '• Inkhorn terms" were no longer tabooed; the ambition to 
say things in a manner different from that of other people was not 
only not discouraged, but was distinctly and definitely encouraged ; 
conceit, quaintness, individuality, were reintroduced into literature. 
The whole bulk of the pamphlet prose, to which we shall come 
presently, expressed the understanding of this, which Lyly's juniors 
at once manifested. 

Meanwhile a contemporary of Lyly's was bringing the plainer 
style itself to a perfection which in this particular stage was the 
highest it ever reached, and which showed that in competent hands 
it need not lack a sober grace, almost beyond that which 
ornater orderings could attain. Richard Hooker was a 
native of Heavitree, a suburb of Exeter, and had been born in 1554 
in poor conditions. He had, however, forebears and living relations 
better off, and his uncle, John Hooker, was an Oxford man, a 
continuator of Holinshed, and a person of consequence under 
the Elizabethan reconquest of Ireland. He is said to have recom- 
mended his nephew to Bishop Jewel, and Jewel assisted Hooker to 
go to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, procured him private pupils, 
and though he himself died when Hooker had not nearly completed 
his Oxford course, was the cause of his becoming first scholar and 
then fellow of his college, and reader in Hebrew in the University. 
He married very foolishly, and was henpecked ; but his friends were 
stanch to him, and he obtained first the living of Drayton Beauchamp 
in Buckinghamshire, then the mastership of the Temple in 1584, 
then the living of Boscombe in 1591, and lastly that of Bishopsbourne 
in Kent, where he died in 1600. At the Temple he had become 
involved in an equally unsought and unseemly controversy with his 
subordinate, the lecturer Travers, a bitter Puritan. Hooker's views, 
when he was transferred once more to the quiet of the country, took 
form in the great treatise called the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity^ 
of which the first five books, as it now stands, are certainly genuine, 
while as to the last three it is as certain that they do not appear as 
he wrote them, but not quite certain how far there was intentional 
garbling in the arrangement of their present form. 

1 Ed. Keble. 



300 ELIZABErHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

We are here concerned witli only one side of this great Apologia 
for the Anglican Church, which, written while the spirit and intentions 
of those who presided over its transformation were well known, has 
an authority that no later work could claim, and which in the most 
charitable spirit, and with absolutely no bitterness of feeling, utterly 
ruined, from the logical and historical side, the position of the English 
Puritans. Long after Hooker's death they achieved a brief victory 
by calling in the secular arm, but Hooker's argument, and his history, 
remained unanswered and triumphant. We are not here further con- 
cerned with it than as a masterly piece of English prose, and in this 
capacity it can hardly be too highly praised. No one, speaking 
otherwise than at random, would give this praise unmixed. Hooker's 
style has the faults of its class — a classicism now timid, now unduly 
audacious ; an unnecessary fear of vivid and vernacular expressions. 
But its author handles the methods and means which he has received 
with original genius, attaining to a really exquisite balance of 
sentence, to a harmony sometimes quite ineffable, adjusting his 
longer and shorter constructions with almost infallible art, . and 
affording a specimen never surpassed, and hardly ever equalled since, 
of argument maintained on abstract and scholastic points without the 
slightest dulness, of ornament which is never daubed or stuck on, 
but arises from the proportion of the phrase, and the careful selection 
of the vocabulary. Had it been possible to have all prose written by 
Hookers, nobody need have wished to seek much further experiment. 
But this was clearly impossible, and the constantly broadening and 
varying demands of the different subjects to whicli prose was applied 
helped the tendency in the air, the mere wish for change, to bring 
that change about. The Ecclesiastical Polity is at least ten years tlie 
junior of Eup/uies, but it is its elder by as much or more in the order 
of style. 

Accordingly, in the general work of the time, it is the influence of 

Lyly, not the influence of Hooker, that we find prevailing. The idea 

that Sidney intended the Arcadia as a protest against Euphuism has 

^ . been dealt with above, and is almost beyond doulit 

Contempora- ' -' 

riesofLyiy erroneous. Sir Philip is as great a Euphuist as Euphues 
an 00 cr. ]iij^-,ggif_ g^^ though his taste was much purer and he 
came nearer to the stately mannerisms of the Jacobean and Caroline 
time than to the fantastic coxcombry of purely Elizabethan prose of 
the ornate kind, was Raleigh ; so was the difficult and sententious, 
but often striking, Fulke Greville. All these were almost exact 
contemporaries of Hooker and Lyly (Raleigh was born in 1552), and 
they present, as no others could do, the union of courtly practice, 
gentle blood, great talents, and a competent education. If Spenser, 
another contemporary, shows a plainer style, we must remember first 



ciiAr. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ET<^. 301 

that Spenser was a poet, and had the fuller harmony in which to 
express himself when he listed ; secondly, that we have but one 
piece of prose of his of any length ; and thirdly, that this piece is a 
sober State paper, though a very admirably written one. Historians 
like Camden (who, indeed, wrote chiefly in Latin) and Knolles and 
Daniel had also little temptation to indulge in ornateness, not to 
mention that Daniel, even in verse, prefers neutral tints to brilliant 
ones, and that Knolles (c. 1544-16 10) belongs to a somewhat elder 
generation than that which we are now discussing, and, though 
he has a stately enough style of his own when he pleases, follows 
chiefly classical models. We should not expect much Euphuism, 
though there is some, in Philip Stubbes, the Puritan whose A)iatomy 
of Adiises, a characteristic but childish work, appeared in 1583; or 
in an enthusiast for practical education like Richard Mulcaster. Yet 
this latter's Treatise of RigJit Writing of the Etiglish Tongue, 1582, 
is quite to our purpose in subject if not in style. Mulcaster, 
an Eton boy, a member both of King's College, Cambridge, and of 
Christ Church at Oxford, Master of Merchant Taylors' School in 
1 561, High Master of St. Paul's from 1596 to within three years of 
his death in 161 1, and prebendary of Salisbury, is an interesting 
person'^ and was an admirable schoolmaster for the time, holding as 
he did a firm belief in the virtues of the classics for study, and in 
those of English for practice. But he was not himself a great man 
of letters, and he had not reached the promised land of English 
prose style to which he cheered others on.^ 

Still, it is not an exaggeration to say that when a man of this 
period and generation does endeavour at style, it is much more prob- 
able tliat his attempt will take the form of ornateness, whether in the 
smaller or in the larger sense of Euphuism, than that it will aim at 
the simpler graces of strict proportion and cadence. And this is 
specially to be observed in some groups of prose writers, who may be 
best noticed here, postponing to the next Book some further com- 
ment on some of the works glanced at in the last paragraph, which 
l)elong to the very latest years of the Queen, or to years later still. 
These are the translators and the pamphleteers, to whom the critics, 
as closely connected with both, may be usefully appended. 

The importance of the Elizabethan translators had never been 

1 Raleigh and otheis will have further notice. The chief pieces of Greville's 
prose (see Grosart's edition of his works, 4 vols. 1870) are his Life (which is not 
a life) of Sidney, for matter, and his Letter to a Lady, for thought and style. The 
late Mr. R. H. Quick, an enthusiast for education, printed (London, 1888) 
Mulcaster's Positions, dealing with that subject, but not the other treatise, entitled 
also with a pleasant quaintness, Ttie First Part of tlie Elementary. Richard 
Knolles's History of t/ic Tiir/cs appeared in 1603, with subsequent editions in 1610 
and 1621, which are not difficult to obtain. 



302 ELTZAUETIIAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 

wholly neglected, owing to their connection with Shakespeare ; but it 
is only recently that it has been fully recognised and the texts them- 
selves brought anew to general knowledge.^ We have 
translators. ^^^^'^ that from almost the earliest mediivval times to 
some extent, and more fully as the centuries passed by, 
each generation endeavoured to familiarise itself with at least some 
of the great writers of antiquity, as well as with those modern books, 
chiefly in French but latterly in other tongues also, which supplied 
important literature. During the time, however, while English was 
simply in the making, it had more to receive than to give, and 
Caxton's naive and delightful admiration of the " fair language of 
French" is only an instance of what was going on. But now an 
original sap was mounting through the trunk of English prose, and 
the results were nowhere more apparent, were perhaps nowhere more 
influential, than here. For a century to come North's- /^/u/arc/i and 
Florio's ^ iMoiitaigne at least were read and re-read with an attention 
which few other English books (except the translation of the Bible) 
could command. The former, as all know, furnished Shakespeare 
with no small proportion of his subjects, and Shakespeare's genera- 
tion, as well as at least that which followed it and another still, with 
their most familiar topics and instances of human conversation and 
political ethics. The latter helped to create the English Essay, de- 
termined to a large extent the course of English philosophy for a time, 
helped (not quite so fortunately) a certain ebb of the national character 
from romantic to sordid schemes of life, and by a cross of the French 
politique begat the English " trimmer." Nor were the minor translators 
in their own day and way less influential. Among these Philemon 
Holland, born at Chelmsford in 1552, a Fellow of Trinity College, 
Cambridge, a doctor of medicine and a schoolmaster at Coventry, 
where he died in 1637, executed rather late in his life versions of 
Livy, Pliny, Plutarch (the Morals), Suetonius, and Xenophon ; 
Thomas Underdowne chd Heliodorus and Ovid ; Nicolls ventured on 
Thucydides, but Thucydides was beyond him ; William Adlington, of 

1 In the very handsome series of Tudor Translations published by Mr. Niitt 
and edited generally by Mr. W. E. Henley, with introductions by various hands. 
I'^lorio has also been given by Mr. Waller in a very pretty little edition (6 vols. 
London, 1897). 

2 Sir Thomas North was of the family which became so notable later, and 
was second son of the first Lord North. Very little is known about him. His 
Plutarcli first appeared in 1579, and he did other translations. 

3 Of Italian extraction, but born in London about 1553. He was a member 
of Magdalen College, Oxford, and began as early as 1578 a scries of handbooks 
in the modern languages, of which he was a teacher. The chief is his MiivA/ c/ 

Words, an Italian-English dictionary. He was much patronised by Elizabeth's 
nobility, and held places in the Household of her successor. His Montaigne 
(licensed in 1599) first appeared in 1603, and he died in 1625. 



CHAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 303 



University College, Oxford, took Apuleius ; '' R. B." Englished some 
.Herodotus ; Sir Henry Savile, the learned Provost of Eton, did 
Tacitus ; and Angel Day wrought Longus through Amyot into the 
vernacular. 

It will readily be understood that whatever interest these transla- 
tions possess arises to hardly the smallest extent from faithful repre- 
sentation of the originals. Savile certainly, Holland to some degree, 
one or two others more or less, were scholars ; but the most 
famous and popular of the versions were usually taken, characteHstics. 
not direct from the original, but from previous French or 
Italian translations, and it was hardly the object of a single one of 
these writers to give their author, their whole author, and nothing but 
their author, in rigidly classical English. Had it been so, they had 
been of far less interest and value to posterity. On the contrary, 
such community of design as is to be seen in them (and it is ratlier 
remarkable) consists in the effort to be at once as vernacular and as 
variegated as may be. They compress, expand, omit, or sometimes 
even insert, as no modern translator would dare to do ; they exhibit 
to the very fullest the double tendency of Euphuism to the finest and 
the most familiar expressions ; and following in this respect Lord 
Berners, if not earlier translators, they put English dresses on foreign 
words and terms in a way infinitely delightful and full of refreshment 
to the tongue, but such as would make our modern purists stare and 
gasp. To this day these translations are a repertory of slang that 
still exists, of racy but obsolete expressions which would else be lost, 
of Latinisms, Gallicisms — isms of every kind. No class of work is 
fuller of that most English of all idioms, the turning of any noun, 
adjective, or substantive into a verb. They had, no doubt, little idea 
of proportion, clioice, grace ; but these were not the things the lan- 
guage needed at the time. It wanted to be thoroughly suppled, 
thoroughly vernacularised, and at the same time to be charged with 
store of good words, native and foreign, classical and modern, from 
which a standard vocabulary could be, as it was, riddled out after- 
wards. The late fourteenth and the fifteenth century writers had 
done their part in teaching English prose " to go " ; Fisher and the 
Ascham school had given it a thorough grammar-school education. 
But these writers and others of Elizabeth''s time were putting it to 
the university, practising it in all sjjorts and arts at once, allowing it, 
it may be, rather a full allowance of wild oats, but enriching it, exer- 
cising it, giving it possessions, memories, experience ; preparing it for 
its future business in a fashion as necessary as the more orderly 
and sedate processes of training which it had previously undergone. 

Exactly the same drift and tendency, though in more original 
matter, is shown by the curious and interesting range of pamphlet 



304 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH isk. v 

literature which, connected very directly in point of authorship with 
the group of University Wits, fills the last twenty years of Elizabeth, 
and extends into those of James and even Charles. This 
pamphleteers, touchcs all, or almost all, varieties of subject with a univer- 
sality which comes not so very far short of the modern 
newspaper ; while in some of its developments may be found a stage 
— a far-off and rudimentary one, it is true — of the great change 
which converted the romance into the modern novel. These pam- 
phlets * — a form of publication which could hardly have come into 
being without the printing press, and which the printing press was almost 
certain to bring about — had been in their earliest shape either 
devoted to the controversies of the Reformation, or else shortened 
chap-book versions of mediaeval literature, romances in verse and in 
prose, jests, books of saws and instances. The sharp discipline of 
the Tudor Queen made the religious pamphlet a probable, and the 
political one an almost certain, short way to the gallows, or at least 
the whipping-post and chopping-block ; so it was little cultivated. 
Yet one famous outbreak, that of the Martin Marprelate 
Marpreiate. Controversy, defied, though only for a time, these pre- 
ventive checks. It concerned (as indeed the pseudonym 
of the various writers on the aggressive side confesses) the anti-pre- 
latical movement in England, but was from the first strongly coloured 
by, and at last became almost wholly merged in, the flood of personal 
reviling which, to the great discredit of the Reformers, they had been 
the first to let loose. The defenders of orthodoxy and authority 
included some grave churchmen and more irresponsible men of 
letters, whom a not erring instinct told that Puritanism was as much 
the foe of literature as of loyalty and order in religion and politics. 
Lyly, Nash, and the Harveys almost or quite to a certainty took part 
in it, and their lampoons, as well as some at least of those of their 
antagonists, display the revel and riot of words which has been indi- 
cated above at its very wildest. 

This, however, was only an episode in the pamphlet history ; 
and it was quickly stopped.'- The pamphlet itself persevered in less 

1 Until recently most of them were inaccessible except in large libraries, and 
even now they are best found in the privately printed issues of Dr. Grosart. His 
" Huth Library " contains Greene, Nasli, Dekkcr, Harvey, and his " Chertsey 
Worthies " the enormous work of Nicholas Breton. The Marprelate tracts were 
])rinted half a century ago by the bookseller^ Petheram, and some more recently, 
with an invaluable account of the whole controversy, by. Mr. Arber, whose Eiiglisli 
Garner contains a great number of scattered pamphlets. Lodge has been given by 
the Huntcrian Club. 

2 I may be permitted to refer the reader who wishes for more on " Martin " 
and the pamphlets generally to my separate history of litizabctlian Literature, 
pp. 223-252. These byways of history are almost closed to the general historian; 
at least he strays if ho pursues them too far. 



ciiAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 305 

dangerous forms — novels, generally of a strongly Euphuist tinge ; 
personal reminiscences, true or feigned ; disquisitions serious or 
comic, not very different, allowing for the time, from those of the 
Addisonian Essay ; a very curious batch of sketches of the manners, 
especially the lower and looser manners, of the capital ; and lastly, 
literary criticism. In all these respects except the last, Robert 
Greene (see last chapter) was the most prolific, and on the whole the 
most gifted. His short Euphuist stories, often diversified by scraps 
of verse, not merely furnished subjects to Shakespeare and others, 
but undoubtedly helped to foster in readers a taste for imaginative 
fiction. His personal sketches are among the earliest of literary 
autobiographies, though they have to be taken with rather numerous 
grains of salt. Above all, his series-©«— "xD'ney-catching" ("rooking," 
card-sharping, etc.), though again not to be taken too literally, is a 
most amusing and, with caution, instructive collection, and continued 
as it was by Dekker in the next generation, gives us a panorama of 
the shady side of London life for nearly half a century. Nash, with 
less romantic gift than Greene, and with no poetical power, yet 
achieved in Jack Wilton, or the Unfortunate Traveller, a novel of 
merit, which " coney-catched " many generations as to the loves of 
Surrey and "Geraldine," and besides his "Marprelate" contributions, 
perhaps in consequence of them, engaged in a furious paper war, the 
other party to which was Gabriel Harvey. Later, Nash, like others, 
wi'ote repentant and pious pamphlets. Perhaps, except in bulk. 
Lodge is even the superior of Greene, in respect of the romantic 
tone of his prose and the exquisite lyric touch of the verse with 
which it is strewn ; while the enormous pamphlet work of Nicholas 
Breton, a step-son of Gascoigne and a voluminous writer in prose 
and verse, belongs, as does that of Dekker, rather to the next period 
than to this.^ 

Lodge, however, will bring us conveniently to the critics, of 
wliom he was one, and who were very often the same persons just 
mentioned, engaged for the moment in literary controversies. The 
most important of these controversies were the Puritan 
attacks on plays and poetry generally, which was opened 
by the School of Abuse of Stephen Gosson {vide supra), and the 
other, longer, and more important controversy, first between metrical 
forms exactly corresponding to tliose of the classics, and then between 
rtiymeless rhythms adjusted more intelligently to the genius' of 

1 The titles of these pamphlets play a great part in them — those of the 
"Marprelate" set liaving a Rabelaisian extravagance, and often a wonderful 
length ; others abounding in favourite Elizabethan catchwords and word-plays, 
like that on " Will " and " Wit " ; and the more romantic pieces attaining great 
prcttiness, as in Lodge's A Afarifitf-itc 0/ America. 
X 



3o6 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH hk. v 

English. The earUer stage of this is best represented by the 
Four Letters of Spenser and Harvey, the later by Campion and 
Daniel. 

The little book of William Webbe, and the much larger one 
attributed to George Puttenham, both,i especially the former, show 
the influence of the first part of this craze. The almost unknown 
William Webbe, who is thought to have been a member of St. John's 
College, Cambridge, and who appears to have been tutor to the sons 
of an Essex squire named Sulyard, pul:)lis]ied his Discourse of English 
Poctrie'in 1586. It contains enthusiastic praise of Spenser, '-the new 
poet," " our late famous English poet who wrote the S/icp/wrd's 
Calendar,'''' refers a good deal to the ancients, and rather superficially 
to the English poets, " scorns and spews out the ragged rout of our 
rakehelly rhymers — for so themselves use to hunt the letter," as 
" E. K.," for self or partner, had done before it, gives us some 
very comical hexameters for the two first eclogues of Virgil, and 
with more zeal than discretion turns Spenser's '"• Ye dainty nymphs "" 
into a slipshod sort of slovenly Sapphics. But Webbe's enthu- 
siasm is pleasing, and his style typical. Puttenham, if he was 
the author of the Art of English Poesie which appeared in 1589, 
was more cautious about the new mania. His volume, which is of 
some length, is a rather orderly treatise on Poetics and Rhetoric 
mixed as commonly, divided into three books, the first of Poets 
and Poesie, the second of Proportion, and the third of Ornament 
— this last being almost entirely devoted to a very full list of the 
Figures of Speech. In dealing with proportion he does not dis- 
dain the fancy shapes — pyramids, etc. — which aroused the anger of 
Addison. As may be guessed from this, Puttenham, who quotes 
his own verse freely and seems to have written it fairly in the stift'er 
manner of the first half of the reign, is rather a formalist, but his 
judgment, when he can get it out of stays, is not contemptible. The 
book is very full, learned, and careful, the work of a scholar and a 
gentleman, and far exceeding in detail and scope anything of the kind 
that was written for ages afterwards. 

1 Both in Mr. Arbor's Reprints. 



INTERCHAPTER V 

Attention has often been drawn to the ambiguity of the title 
EHzabethan Literature, as commonly used. " Is it not," they say, 
" absurd to include under such a head the work of men who, like 
Milton and Browne, were not born till after the Queen's death, and 
did not die till tlie last quarter of the seventeenth century had arrived 
or was at the door?" "Is it not even the fact that most of the 
masterpieces of this literature were not produced at all till the reign 
of James ? " It is desirable to remember these facts ; but it is still 
more desirable to remember the others, first that all the seed of the 
whole period called Elizabethan was sown, and that not a little of it 
had come up, before the Queen's death ; and secondly, that the quality 
of the period 1 580-1660 is essentially one and indivisible. There 
are differences between Milton and Spenser, but they are differences 
rather of degree than of kind. The differences between Milton and 
Dryden are difl;erences at least of species, almost of genus. 

Our present arrangement has the advantage of keeping both 
sets of facts in view, and in especial of directing attention to the 
characteristics of the first generation of the period, the generation 
which, as typified by Spenser, ended a little before the last evil days 
of Elizabeth's own life closed. It is perfectly tme that among the 
completed work of this time we find but one name, that of Spenser 
himself, which represents, undoubtedly and unquestionably, a star of 
the first magnitude and the widest orbit, and that perhaps two others, 
Marlowe and Hooker, are the only companions that can be assigned 
to him by a criticism which unites exactness with liberality. But it 
is not at all necessary to take refuge from this fact in another, the 
fact that, in the last date at least of the time, we have the wonderful 
beginnings of Shakespeare in drama, of Bacon in prose, of Donne and 
others in pure poetry. There is a third aspect under which the 
period requires no allowance, no compensation of any kind, and which 
enables it to stand on the credit of its own capital and revenue. It 
is this aspect, too, which makes it peculiarly desirable to mark it off 
distinctly, though not too sharply, from its successor. It was the period 

307 



3o8 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. 

of the remaking, in different degrees for the different departments, but 
in all of the remaking, and in one practically of the making, of English 
Literature. 

This process is most definitely and clearly mapped out in regard 
to Poetry. If the facts of the foregoing Books and the concentrated 
lessons of their Interchapters have been followed, the necessity for the 
remaking will here need little enforcement. Chaucer had gathered 
up all the stuff and all the methods of mcdia,'\al work in English 
verse, had added much of his own, and had left poetry in a stage of 
relative perfection. But the succession failed. Even men who were 
of more than man's estate at the time of his death, like Lydgate and 
Occleve, could not manage what he left them ; and changes, obscure 
in process but obvious in kind and in result, increased the difficulty 
for their successors. Nor were Wyatt and Surrey in a position to 
undertake the reshaping with a view to the future, not the past. Both 
had genius, but it was genius rather fine than strong : both were 
shortlived ; and both came a little too early for their task. Nor did 
they for a long time find any seconds, and perhaps it was just as 
well. The obscure alterations of constitution, the changes of life, 
had to complete themselves before the new poetry could come. 
Then " the new poet " brought it. 

On the whole, what Spenser did has been rather under- than over- 
valued, and his greatness only depends in part, and hardly the largest 
part, on the personal opinion which this or that reader may form 
of the poetical merit even of the Faerie Qiieene. It may be, as 
some think, a venerable and in parts beautiful but tedious and out-of- 
date allegory, or it may be, as others think, by far the greatest long 
poem in English. It may be anything between these two estimates. 
But the aesthetic variation has no place in the clear verdict of 
history. It is indisputable (which is not the same thing as being 
undisputed) that Spenser practically created the diction and prosody 
of English poetry as both have subsisted in the main to the present 
day. He did not, of course, finish the creation. Shakespeare had 
to come, and Milton, at least, before that was done; but he did a 
great deal more than begin it. His. versification had to receive not a 
little extension, and an infinite process — a process not yet ended — of 
permutations and combinations, but it has not to the present day 
undergone any fundamental change. His diction — correctly but 
short-sightedly condemned by Ben as '^ no language" — was in fact a 
bold recognition of the fact that merely the current language of the 
day or any common day can never be the diction of poetry, that 
poetry needs a diction cunningly and carefully, but always to a greater • 
or less extent alienated, refined, distinguisJied from the diction of 
prose. The enormous dead-lift which he gave to poetry, and the 



INTERCH AFTER V 309 



results of which were apparent in the ten last years of his life, and 
the fifty or more following it, was only in very small part due to 
direct imitation of his own work as such. It was due, even in 
the hands of Shakespeare, even in the hands of Milton, to the fact 
that Shakespeare first and Milton afterwards had in their hands the 
stock of language, the plant of prosody, which Spenser had first 
founded and set going. The kinds of sonnet and of satire, of history- 
poem and poem-philosophical, which sprang up so abundantly in his 
footsteps are interesting, but they are not really so interesting to 
history as this complete reorganisation of the poet's material and of 
his means, as this remaking of English verse. 

The position of the age in Prose is hardly less important, though 
its achievement is much less decided. No single prose-writer of the 
time, not even Hooker, holds the same rank in prose that Spenser 
holds in poetry; perhaps, indeed, no single writer, not even Dryden, 
ever has held that rank. For prose, the lower and less intense 
harmony, is the more varied and indefinitely adjustable instrument. 
And while it is conceivable tliat one man — indeed, Shakespeare has 
very nearly done so — should catch up and utter, in hint and intima- 
tion at least, the whole sum of poetry, no one could do the like in 
prose. Here, too, the comparative newness of the form had its 
inevitable effect ; even the period of sheer experiment and exploration 
was not over when the sixteenth century ended. 

Very great advances had been made in both, and, above all, the 
anthwiny of prose, the opposition of the plain and ornate styles which 
was to dominate the rest of its history, was for the first time clearly 
posed and definitely worked out on either side. This could not have 
happened in the earlier period of mere or main translation as regards 
subject, of tentative accumulation of vocabulary and experimental 
adaptation of arrangement. Vestiges, or rather rudiments, of the 
antinomy would, of course, appear encouraged by nature of subject or 
temperament of writer. A Chaucer translating the metres of Boethius 
about the motion of the heavens was not likely to write like a Cap- 
grave in his chronicle. But the opposition was accidental and rudi- 
mentary first of all. Not till the weariness of the "aureate" diction of 
the fifteenth century — itself shown chiefly in verse — led the Cambridge 
school to denounce inkhorn terms, and combined with their worship 
of the classics to devise a plain classical style, could the inevitable 
revolt and rebound array itself definitely with a purpose, a programme, 
a creed, and become, first in the hands of Lyly and his followers, a 
striking grotesque, and then in those of Bacon and the great seven- 
teenth-century writers, a magnificent resurrection of rhetoric in a far 
more glorious form than she had ever known. But at any rate the 
quarrel was at last fairly put, the "dependency" distinctly established. 



3IO ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH hk. 

Henceforward the el)b and How of prose style lias reigned with only 
superficial change for tliree centuries, alternately seeking the correct 
and simple or the out-of-the-way and gorgeous as ideals, and falling 
into the tame or vulgar, the extravagant or gaudy, as excesses. 

In Drama, the third division, which deserves to be kept apart 
from poetry and prose, not only because it indifferently applies the 
form of both, but because by its importation of speecli and action it 
intioduces elements not strictly appropriate to either, the importance 
of the time has commonly seemed greatest of all. It is certainly 
somewhat different in nature. Here we have neither a reconstruc- 
tion and recovery in greater and more promising form of a state 
formerly reached and then lost, as in poetry ; nor a comparatively 
orderly extension of a campaign not yet crowned with complete 
victory, as in prose. But we most certainly have the sudden shaking 
together into their right places of elements which hitherto have been 
loosely whirling like the Lucretian atoms ; and it is at least arguable 
that we have the attainment of a final form. At any rate three entire 
centuries have failed to produce any new really fertile cross, or to 
import, in conditions suitable to the climate, any foreign form capable 
of standing comparison with that Elizabethan play wliich shook itself 
into shape, a hundred minor hands besides those of Marlowe and 
Shakespeare aiding, by the date of the production of Evoy Man in 
his Hunionr. 

Much as has been written about this play, it has perhaps been 
insufficiently recognised that its idea, whether the matter be tragical 
or comical, whether it keep these kinds apart or mix them as 
ingeniously as in the famous classification of Hatnlet^ is essentially 
the same — to wit, that the play shall be a piece of life, rendered as 
faitlifully and separately as possible, with all its divagations, its in- 
terludes, its inconsistencies, its interruptions. This is, of course, 
diametrically opposed to the classical theory, and to the theory of 
almost every modern drama except the Spanish, even to a certain 
extent of that. Aristotle's at first sight odd, but, whether right or 
wrong, all-important comparison of a play to an animaP helps us, 
perha])s better than anything, to understand the difference. Nothing 
that is not vitally connected with the animal — with the central notion 
of the play itself — must appear ; the Unities (not in their absurd seven- 
teenth-century caricature, but in their actual Greek limitation) follow 
naturally; second plots are impossible, for two-natured is no nature. 
We may have intensity and accomplishment ; but, above all, we must 
have limit. 

The Elizabethan idea is far more ambitious and grand, even if 

1 I am aware that some of tlie latest authorities take ^i^ov in the sense of 
"picture," but I cannot agree with them, at least for an exclusive explanation. 



INTERCHAPTER V 3" 



doomed to fail in all but the strongest hands. The poet does not 
attempt to isolate action or situation merely ; his play is but a 
piece of the life of the actors — their life is but a piece of larger 'and 
ever larger lives. Nothing is superfluous, irrelevant, common, un- 
clean ; everything may and shall go in. The intenser nature of the 
interests of tragedy may give to the working of tragic plays a closer 
unity than that of comic; the majesty or the pathos of some particular 
character may dwarf in presentation as in attention the episodes and 
the interludes. But the principle is always the same. The touch 
with the actual is never loosed, the farrago of the play is the farrago 
of life. 

It is the just and abiding glory of Marlowe that, so far as one 
man could, he really seems to have hit, consciously or not, on this 
vast conception, and that he certainly perfected, or went far to per- 
fect, the only instrument of verse that could possibly serve as a 
medium of execution for it. But his own plays as plays are after all 
only the most magnificent of failures, and without a Shakespeare the 
possibility of the thing could never have been shown. Whether the 
possibility of it has ever been fully shown exxept by Shakespeare is a 
point on which it would be partly irrelevant and wholly anticipatory 
to dwell here. 

That the mere form of play which was strong enough and elastic 
enough to give shape to this mighty attempt developed itself out of 
tlie beggarly elements of the mystery and interlude, with the 
undoubted but only partial help and crossing of the classical drama, 
lias been, I hope, shown, with less violence to fact and probability than 
other theories require. But it can never be denied that the trans- 
formation is astonishing. It was not so rapid, nor does it display 
such individual power of genius, as that which in a single manls 
bands evolved the relatively perfect poetical work of Chaucer from 
tlie interesting but in no single case perfect experiments of the 
hundred and fifty years before him. More than a generation had to 
pass, a vast company of men, unknown, half-known, and known, had 
to be continuously at work, l^efore the childish puppet-plays — com- 
paratively speaking — of Udall and Sackville and Still passed into the 
completed work of Shakespeare. But as the process was slower, so 
the result was more sure. Chaucer's work, as we have seen, found 
no following except in a half-foreign country, and from men who were 
themselves unable to hand on the art in living condition. The thirty 
years of experiment in drama, from 1560 to 1590, were succeeded by 
fifty more of the most abundant, varied, vigorous, and, for the best 
of the time, brilliant production that any literary form has ever 
enjoyed. 



BOOK VI 

LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE 
CHAPTER I 

SHAKESPEARE 

The luck of Jacobean literature — Concentration of the great drama in it — 
Shakespearian chronology — The life — The work — The poems — The Soimets 
— Their formal and spiritual supremacy — Probable divisions of plays: the 
earlier — Their verse and phrase— Their construction — Their characters — 
The middle division: the Merry Wives — The Romantic comedies — The 
great tragedies, Roman and Romantic — Last plays — Doubtful plays 

It will have been seen already with what large cautions and provisos 
the familiar term Elizabethan Literature has to be taken. The 
phenomenon to which we apply it took its rise within the reign of 
the Queen, or — if we take that rise to be manifested by xhe luck of 
the publication and appreciation of the Songs and Sonnets Jacobean 
— on the latest eve of that reign. But it grew very 
slowly. More than twenty years passed before anything really 
striking and decisive either in prose or poetry appeared ; nearly 
thirty before really characteristic and original drama emerged, and 
then not by any means completely, from the condition of experiment. 
Even after Enp/iites and the SliepJienVs Calendar had distinctly fore- 
told great things in the two ordinary harmonies, another ten or 
fifteen years' schooling had to be undergone before the general time 
of production was reached. And the greatest work of all, putting 
Spenser, Hooker, and Marlowe aside, was mostly borne, though as 
non sua ponia, by the reign of James. 

Despite the extreme uncertainty of Shakespearian chronology, we 
do know that a considerable part of Shakespeare's work was done 

2>^i 



314 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

before 1603. But certainly the best part was not. Very little of 
Jonson antedates the Queen's death ; the meagre bundles of notes, 
interesting and pregnant as they are, which constitute the first edition 
of Bacon's Essays, would, had they never been augmented, have 
given us no idea whatever of his real literary powers ; the best 
work of men like Daniel and Drayton was to come. What is 
perhaps not more really surprising, but more startling at first 
sight than the slowness of the rise of this great literature, is the 
rapidity, in the case of its most notable and characteristic constituent, 

of the decline. Omitting the work of Marlowe, which 

"of the '"" ^V'ls prematurely brought to a close, the early work of 

great drama Shakespeare, and a little more on the farther side, with 

a much smaller part of that of Ford, RLassinger, and 
otliers on the hither — the whole bulk of the English drama was 
written between 1600 and 1625. Almost the whole bulk of it 
that has really commanding merit was written between 1590 
and 1640 — periods of exactly a quarter of a century in the first 
case, of exactly half a century in the second. Fletcher died 
less than ten years after Shakespeare, and in tlie work of ail 
the men who survived Fletcher, decadence is api);uent. There 
are, of course, those who would say that it is api)arent in Fletcher 
himself, even in those works of his which, being certainly, or almost 
certainly, in part due to Beaumont (who died before Shakespeare), are 
contemporary with the masterpieces of the class. But this is perhaps 
an extravagantly rigid and arbitrary scheme of classification. It is 
enough to say that between 1600 and 1625 all the best of our 
dramatists except Marlowe were working more or less simultaneously; 
and that within this period all the known kinds of tlie great drama 
itself had been discovered and practised. What is more is that 
within this same time the great metrical etfect of drama upon English 
poetry had been, for good, entirely accom[)lishcd. and was already 
Ijeginning to turn to evil — an evil which was not limited to its own 
immediate form. 

Reference has already been made to the foct that an attack on 
the score of plagiarism and other misdemeanors had been made by 
Greene, before his death in 1592, upon a certain Shakescene, who 

has been naturally identified with William Shakespeare, 
chronology*" ^^^ ^e do not know with any certain or satisfactory 

knowledge upon what work of Shakespeare's this attack 
was directed. All the more careful and reasonable accounts of his 
life and work mark the earliest play-dates, where they give them, 
with a tell-tale circa. It is only by guesses that anything is dated 
before the Comedy of Errors, at the extreme end of 1594; and the 
Comedy of Errors, unmistakably Shakespearian as it is here and 



SHAKESPEARE 315 



there in character and versification, is so exceedingly crude both in 
these points and in composition generally, that the conjectural ante- 
dating of plays like Richard ///., and still more A MidsuDiiiier 
NigJits Dream, becomes from the literary point of view almost 
utterly incredible. And it may not be improper to add a very earnest 
protest against the attempt to group plays and classes of plays 
according to successive supposed states of the poet's mind and 
temper. Where there is crudity of character, artlessness of verse, 
or very flagrantly chaotic composition (it must be remembered that 
Shakespeare's composition is not to be judged by the rules of any 
ancient abbe or modern journalist) then we may with a clear literary 
conscience ticket this as "probably early." Otherwise, in default of 
positive documentary evidence, there would not be much reason for 
putting The Tempest later than A Midsummer Nighfs Drea>/i, or 
A IVinter's Tale than Romeo and Juliet. A poet, especially a poet 
like Shakespeare, is not a vegetable ; you cannot count the years of 
his work by any real or fancied number of rings in his heart. Bad 
verse, inhuman character, clumsy composition — become after a time 
impossible to him ; in temper and choice of subject he abides 
supreme and free. 

The results of the almost ferocious industry spent upon unearth- 
ing and analysing every date and detail of Shakespeare's life are on 
the whole very meagre, and for literary purposes almost entirely 
unimportant, while with guesswork we have nothing to 
do. The certainties may be summarised very briefly. 
William Shakespeare was traditionally born on the 24th of April, and 
certainly baptized on the 26th of April 1564, at Stratford-on-Avon. 
His grandfather's name was Richard, that of his father, a dealer in 
hides, gloves, corn, wood, etc., was John, and the poet's mother was 
Mary Arden. He had two sisters and three brothers. The family, 
which through Mary Arden had some small landed property, was 
at one time prosperous, at others not. Shakespeare himself married 
early ; the date of the actual ceremony is not known, but a bond of 
marriage passed between him and his wife Anne Hathaway on 
November 1582, when he was little more than eighteen, and his 
wife, a yeoman's daughter, eight years older. They had three children, 
Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith, and there is absolutely no docu- 
mentary evidence of the slightest value as to the terms on which 
they lived together. Tradition there is — though of no great age, 
and of exceedingly slight authority — as to his leaving Stratford for 
London, perhaps in 1585, 1586, or 1587, and perhaps in consequence 
of a deer-stealing prank in the neighbouring park of Sir Thomas 
Lucy of Charlecote. He perhaps began his connection with the 
theatre as a horse-holder, and was pretty certainly an actor before 



3i6 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LVrERATURE kk. vi 



long. In 1593 appeared his first work, the remarkable Fenns atui 
Adonis, and next year the rather less remarkable Liicrece. He was 
connected soon after the middle of the last decade of the century 
with divers theatres, became a shareholder in them, and by 1597 
could buy a good house, New Place, at Stratford, where he afterwards 
enlarged his property. It is to be noted that his constant residence 
at London during these ten years, his desertion of his wife, etc., are 
all matters of guesswork founded on barely negative evidence. It is 
not in the slightest degree impossible that Anne Shakespeare was 
with her husband for the whole time, or that he made frequent visits 
home. But there are fair grounds for supposing that London was 
his headquarters during the decade from 1586 to 1596, his partial 
residence during the next, and only occasionally visited by him 
during tlie third — at the close of which, in 1616 on 23rd April, he 
died. The best-known detail about him perhaps, and a sample of 
the trivial things on which structures of gossip have been based, is 
his bequest of his second-best bed to his wife. Personal references 
to him are not numerous and rather vague, though except in the 
case of Greene's splenetic outburst (if it be meant for Shakespeare) 
always complimentary. His reputation, though it has steadily grown, 
has always been great ; there has never from the day of his death to 
this day been wanting testimony to his position from the greatest 
living names of the time in English literature. 

Shakespeare's works, in the generally accepted canon, consist of 
a comparatively small body of non-dramatic poems, the two pieces 
above mentioned, a body of 154 sonnets, and a very few shorter 
pieces somewhat more doubtfully genuine, on the one 
^""^ ■ hand ; on the other, of about twenty times as much 
dramatic work divided into thirty-seven plays, which in the original 
edition, published seven years after the owner's death by his friends 
Heminge and Condell (this does not contain Pericles), are classed as 
"tragedies, comedies, and histories." Before this edition, and during 
Shakespeare's lifetime, only a few of the plays had been printed in 
quartos of doubtful authenticity ; the Venus, the Lucrece, and the 
Sounds appeared with his name and pretty certainly under his 
superintendence. The spelling of the name varies from Shaxper to 
Shakespeare. But if Greene's gibe at it is good for anything, it 
settles the pronunciation as nearest the latter form, and this is the 
s[)clling on the title-page of the Sonnets, the only book of his pub- 
lished in his lifetime, after he was famous, and obviously with his 
leave if not by him. 

In view of the extreme uncertainty of date of most of the plays 
before 1600, the certain attribution of the two larger poems to 1593- 
94, and of the Sonnets (though they were not printed till 1609) to 



SHAKESPEARE 317 



1598 or earlier, when they are mentioned in Meresls Palladis Taz/iia,^ 
is very important and solid. These early dates, and the fact that all 
the three larger pieces or groups are concerned with love, show us in 
a more personal fashion than the scheme of the drama (always more 
or less impersonal, and in Shakespeare's hands extraordinarily so) 
what manner of man and poet Shakespeare was in his youth. 
The dominant tone in all three is passion, combined in the Sonnets 
with an intense and wide-sweeping thought. In some more general 
and obvious characteristics Venjts and Adonis and T/ie Rape of 
Liicreee differ little from other members of a large class of Elizabethan 
poems referred to above (p. 267). They select, on the pattern of 
many writers of the French and Italian Renaissance, subjects at once 
luscious and tragical, and they apply the new melodious verse, of 
which Spenser had taught the secret, to the discussion of them in a 
manner which appeals at once to the sensual and the sentimental 
emotions. 

But if the class was the same, the individuals are very different. 
There were already many tuneful singers in 1593; but none of them 
except the master himself could raise such a pageant of voluptuous 
imagery, or accompany it with such a symphony of harmonious 
sound, ■'s we find in Venus and Adonis. No one except Spenser and 
Sackville evoked the rhyme-clangour of the stanza '^ with such deli- 
cate art ; no one except these two had jDortrayed such vivid pictures 
as the arrest of Adonis by Venus, the captivity of Mars, the portrait 
of herself by the goddess, the escape of the courser, the description 
of the boar and of the hare-hunt, the solitary night, the discovery of 
the foolish youth who has fled from Love's 'arms to those of 
Death. But while none, save these, of men living had done, or 
could have done, such work, there was much here which — whether 
either could have done it or not — neither had done. 

In the first place there is, almost for the first time in English 
poetry since Chaucer, a directness of observation in the sketches 
from nature. Sackville, so far as his brief space and peculiar subjects 
allowed him, Spenser far more, are great painters and 

'01 -j'fjg poems. 

describers. But even the later and greater poet rather 
displa3's a magnificently decorative convention in painting than a 
direct re-creative or reproductive touch. Shakespeare, even in these 
earliest days, has this latter — the horse and the hare, though the 
most famous and elaborate, are only two out of many instances of it 
in the Venus. In the second place, the slow movement, which is of 

1 Meres's extremely interesting tliough singularly uncritical sketch of contem- 
porary and other English literature will be found in Mr. Arbor's English Garner, 
ii. 94. 

2 Venus and Adonis is in the six-, Lucrece in the seven-lined stave. 



3i8 LATER ELIZABPTMAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE iu<. vi 

the essence of the poetry of Sackville and of Spenser, and whicli is 
certainly invited by the six-lined stanza in which the Vem/s is written 
almost as much as by the rhyme-royal and the Spenserian, cannot 
adjust itself to the infinite variety and the directly lyrical flow of 
Shakespeare's versification. It is not a mere accident which has 
made composers choose '• Bid me discourse " and " Lo, here the gentle 
lark " for setting to song measures of the lightest quality ; and 
throughout the poet shows himself — even more than Spenser, how 
much more then than any one else! — the absolute master of his metre, 
the tregetoiir, to whom all conditions of phrase and rhythm are 
merely materia prima out of which he can make whatsoever he will. 
And lastly, though of necessity in less measure and degree, tliat gift 
of indicating character, of opening up whole unending vistas of 
thought by a single phrase, which is Shakespeare's as it is hardly 
any one else's, is here. Of Adonis, the story forbade him to make 
much. But it would have been so easy to make Venus contemptible 
or disgusting or simply tedious ; and she escapes all three fates so 
completely! The escape, no doubt, is effected partly, if not mainly, 
by the unfailing intensity of passion whicli the poet suffuses, but we 
are concerned chiefly with the means of suffusion. They are, I take 
it, mainly, if not wholly, comprised in that magic of the single phrase 
in which Shakespeare (for this is not Spenser's gift) reminds us of 
no predecessor but Chaucer, and in which he outdoes Chaucer more 
than Chaucer outdoes others. 

Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty — 
Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain — 
Love is a spirit all compact of fire — 
He sees her coming and begins to glow 
Even as a dying coal revives with wind — 
Her two blue windows faintly she upheaveth — 
Was melted like a vapour from her sight — 

are mere specimens selected half at random from the things of this 
kind with which the piece swarms. ''Conceited," "over-luscious," 
''unoriginal"— half a dozen other epithets the merely stop-watch 
critic may heap upon Venus and Adonis. One epitliet, sometimes 
used in disparagement, it does deserve — it is 3'oung, but with the 
youth of Shakespeare. 

Much of wliat has been said will apply to Liicrece, which chiefly 
differs from its predecessor in liaving a seven-line stanza, and in 
dealing with criminal, and not merely unhappy and tragic, passion. 
It is, however, on the whole, inferior; being not merely longer (and 
the style is not improved by length), but written with something more 
of an approach to the old fifteenth-century manner of allegoric and 



SHAKESPEARE 319 



other padding. We should be sorry not to have it as well as the 
Ve/i!/s, but it could not supply its companion's place. 

The SoHJU'ts do not reveal to us a more exquisite or richly gifted 
poet than does the Venus ; but they take us to a higher range of 
subject, where sensuous imagery is indeed not absent, but where the 
poet's absorption in it has given way to a more direct 

... ,- , .11 !• • • The So/iiieis. 

dommation ot the ideal, to meditation upon passion 
rather than realisation of it. The endless discussions on the person- 
ages probably or possibly concerned must be sought elsewhere. 
The famous dedication^ is, almost to a certainty, enigmatic of malice 
prepense ; but there is no reason to question the fact suggested by 
the text throughout, and exi^licitly asserted once in it, that '"a man 
right fair " and '' a woman coloured ill " were the objects, either suc- 
cessive or simultaneous, of the poet's passionate attachment. That 
these two persons were live individual beings ; that the passion was 
actually felt, but for one, two, five, or fifty other persons quite differ- 
ent from those adumbrated ; or that the poems have no necessary 
connection with any particular person, will never be exclusively 
asserted or denied by any one acquainted with human nature. 

All these theories and others are possible ; none is proved ; 
and, for the literary purpose, none is really important. What is 
important is that Shakespeare has here caught up the sum of love 
and uttered it as no poet has before or since, and that in so doing he 
carried poetry — that is to say, the passionate expression in verse of 
the sensual and intellectual facts of life — to a pitch which it had 
never previously reached in English, and which it has never out- 
stepped since. The coast-line of humanity must be wholly altered, 
the sea must change its nature, the moon must draw it in different 
ways, before that tide-mark is passed. 

These Sonnets are written in the English form, which is some- 
times called from them the Shakespearian, and which, as already 
explained, is quite entitled to claim equality with the chief Italian or 
Petrarchian. Three quatrains, not connected by any xheir formal 
necessary or usual community of rhyme, are tipped with and spiritual 
a couplet ; and, generally speaking, though not invariably, ^"P''^'"^'=y- 
the opposition or balance of octave and sestet which the Petrarchian 
form naturally invites is replaced here by a steady building up of the 
thought through the douzain, and then either a climax or a quick anti- 

1 "To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness 
and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing ad- 
venturer in setting forth. T. T. F. T." is admitted to be Thomas Thorpe 

the publisher; the "ever-living poet" is open to no doubt, as the title-page has 
" Shakespeare's Sonnets." But who " Mr. W. H." was, that is the question. It 
matters extremely little, but general opinion and fair probability incline to William 
Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Sidney's nephew. 



320 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE uk. vi 

strophe in the final couplet. Tiie form is extraordinarily suitable to the 
subjects and may be said to be, for the sonnet meditative, actually pref- 
erable to the octave-and-sestet, though the latter may have advantages 
for the sonnet descriptive. No such samples of the peculiar phrase 
beauty of the Sonnets can be given as those which were possible in 
the case of the Venus, simply because of their bewildering abundance. 
Every sonnet, and perhaps a majority of the two thousand lines or 
thereabouts, contains them ; and among them are numbered no small 
proportion of the highest, the intensest, the most exquisite jewels of 
English poetry. But their general characteristic as verse is a steady 
soaring music, now lower, now higher, never exactly glad but always 
passionate and full, which can be found nowhere else — a harmonic 
of mighty heart-throbs and brain-pulsings which, once caught, never 
deserts the mind's ear. Like all the greatest poetry, this is almost 
independent of meaning though so full of it ; you can attend to the 
sense or disregard it as you please, certain in ^ch case of satisfac- 
tion. The thoughts are not so far-fetched, the music not quite so 
unearthly, as in some poems of the next generation, but they are more 
universal, more commanding, more human. The mastery which had 
been partially attained in Venus and Adonis is complete here. There 
is nothing that the poet wishes to say that he cannot say, and there 
is hardly a district of thought and feeling into which he does not at 
least cast glances of unerring vision. 

The faculty, which in this direction attained such early command, 
seems in tlte more complex and various departments of dramatic 
exercise to have developed itself, as might be expected, more slowly 
in proportion to the bulk and variety of its accomplish- 
d^isions'of ment. What really is Shakespeare's earliest dramatic 
plays: work is, as has been said, in the highest degree un- 
certain ; and of the pieces which are with more or less 
probability ascribed to his earliest period it is not definitely known 
how much is his own, how much supplied by or borrowed from others. 
From the beginning of the play, as distinguished from tlie interlude, 
the habit seems to have established itself, in England as in other 
countries, of constantly reworking old pieces by new hands ; and it 
is probably to some exceptional popularity of Shakespeare as a 
refashioner in this way that Greene's outburst refers. His early pieces, 
then, may be divided into anticipations, more or less original, of his 
special masterpiece, the romantic comedy, attempts in the blood- 
and-thunder melodrama of the time, and probably, in most cases, 
refashioned chronicle-plays or " histories," a kind, as we have seen, as 
old as Bale. To the first division belong Love's LaboHr''s Lost, the 
Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Comedy of Errors (this touching the 
translated classical play), Measure for Measure ( ?), the series culminat- 



SHAKESPEARE 321 



ing in A Midsuvimer Nighfs Drca?ii ; to the second T///(s Aiidroui- 
ciis i to the last the majority of the great series of the English histories, 
while Koinco and Juliet stands apart as what we may call a romantic 
tragedy corresponding to the romantic comedy, and promising almost 
greater things to come. 

In all this work, guessing as little as we can, and proceeding as 
gingerly as possible, we can see the poet's genius growing and settling 
itself in every possible way. In metre he begins with the lumbering 
fourteeners, not as yet quite spirited up even by him, 
the stiff blank verse which even from the first becomes and phrascf 
pliant in his hand, the richer but almost stiiTer Marlovian 
hectoring style, the quaint fantasies and euphuistic devices of Lyly, 
all frequently lapsing into rhymed couplet and even stanza. But 
almost from the very first there are glimpses, and very soon there 
are much more than glimpses, of something that we have never 
seen before. Such a phrase, for instance, to take but the first that 
occurs, as the 

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 
From this world- wearied flesh, 

of Romeo and Juliet takes us a long way beyond Marlowe, a longer 
way beyond Peele. In both these masters there is a deficiency of 
vibration in the verse, and a certain poverty, or at least simplicity, 
of verbal music. " Native wood-notes wild " is rather truer of Peele 
tlian of Shakespeare. Even Shakespeare could not often outdo 
Marlowe in a sort of economy of majesty, the grandeur of a huge 
blank cliiT-face, or of the empty welkin itself. But as his meaning is 
more complex, farther-ranging, more intricately developed than theirs, 
so are his versification and his form. The incomparable skill that was 
to achieve such things as 

Peace, peace ! 

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast 

That sucks the nurse asleep? 

or the famous Tempest passage about " the stuff that dreams are 
made of," confronts us in the making (and a very rapid making) 
quite early. We find in it the quaint euphuisms of Love''5 LaboHr''s 
Lost, in the unequal speeches of the Tiuo Gentlemen, even in such a 
partly farcical medley as the Comedy of Errors, and such an ill- 
mingled mass of farce and tragedy as Measure for Measure. The 
real Shakespeare cannot help showing himself, if only by a flash of 
verse here and there ; and then we are in presence of something 
new — of a kind of English poetry that no one has hit upon before 
and which, as we cannot but feel, is revolutionising the whole 



322 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE inc. vi 

structure and character of English verse. He may rhyme, or he may 
not rhyme, .or he may turn to prose ; but always there is the new 
phrase, the new language, conceited to the despair of pedants, playing 
on words in a fashion maddening to dullards, not always impeccable 
from the stricter standpoints of taste, but always instinct with creative 
genius. 

In respect of construction and dramatic conception these early 
works, as we might expect, are less advanced. The chronicle play 
of its nature defies construction of the ordinary kind, though some- 
times, as in Marlowe's Edivard II. and Shakespeare's 
structbn. '^^^^ Richards, the actual story may be sliort and central 
enough to give something like definite plot. It is, how- 
ever, remarkable how Shakespeare contrives to infuse into these 
chronicles, or, as they may be not inaccurately termed, these dra- 
matic romances, something of the unity of the regular play or dramatic 
epic. He will do it by the most various means — sometimes, as in 
King John, by the contrasted attraction of the tragedy of Constance 
and Arthur and the comedy of the Bastard Falconbridge ; some- 
times, as in Henry IV., by the inclusion of a non-historical char- 
acter, like Falstaff, of the very first interest and importance, with 
the subsidiaries necessary to set it off; sometimes, as in Henry V., 
by projecting an idea (in this case the patriotic idea of England) 
in such a fashion that the whole of the play, humours and all, im- 
poses it on the spectator. But in the miscellaneous plays there is 
much less unity of construction, and, as yet, the romantic attraction 
of character is not quite secured. The defeat of the project of 
seclusion from womankind in Love's Laboitr's Lost might hardly, in 
any case, have been sufficient by itself, and is certainly not made 
sufficient ; the play, agreeable as it is, loses itself in humours, and 
episodes, and single combats of wit and love. The central story of 
tlie T7V0 Geni/enicn is not more than enough for an ordinary noiivclle, 
and it may be questioned whether that of Romeo and Juliet is in 
itself much more. But this latter is quintessenced, and e.xalted to 
tlie heavens, by the pure and intense poetic quality of its verse, by 
the pity of it in the case of the hero and ptill more the heroine, and 
by the contrasted flashes of w it and gallantry in Mercutio and Tybalt 
and the rest. So in the other and lighter masterpiece, A Midsnni- 
vier N'ighfs Dreatn, which probably belongs to this period, the subtle 
fidelity to the dream-nature perhaps makes it unnecessary to give, 
but certainly as a matter of fact excludes, any elaborate character- 
drawing. Indeed, always and everywhere at this period, Shake- 
speare's character is far ahead of his plot. Some indeed, to whom 
critical adhesion can here by no means he given, would maintain 
that this was always the case, and that to the very last the dazzling 



SHAKESPEARE 323 



and transcendent truth and mastery of the great personages help to 
bUnd the reader to the want of that •• clockwork " excellence of con- 
struction which Jonson could perhaps already give, and was certainly 
to give before Shakespeare's death. Let it rather be said that 
Shakespeare at this time had not quite acquired the art of construct- 
ing up to his character-level; that later, when he had learnt it, he 
never cared to give more construction than was necessary for his 
characters : and that in this he was right. It may be questioned — 
heresy as the statement will seem to some — whether construction, 
pitched to the perfection of the Silent IVonian or of Tom Jones, is 
not something of a to/tr de force, and whether it does 
not deserve liacon's pleasant sneer in another matter, a'c'^ers.^'^ 
"you may see as good sights in tarts." Life does not 
consider or contrive so curiously. However this may be, Shake- 
speare at this time was certainly not "our best plotter"; he was 
already at times an almost perfect artist in character, as he was a 
quite perfect poet. Even in such "more rawer" work as tlie Two 
Gentlemen, " Who is Silvia ? " does not more show us the master of 
lyric than Julia and Lance show us the master of the graver and the 
lighter, the more passionate and the more frivolous, psychology and 
ethology. Even in that unequal medley. Measure for AleasnreJ the 
great scene between Isabel and Claudio so far transcends anythmg 
that English, anything that European, drama had had to show for 
nearly two thousand years, that in this special point of view it remains 
perhaps the most wonderful in Shakespeare. 1 Marlowe has nothing 
like it; his greatest passages, psychologically speaking, are always 
monologues ; he cannot even attempt the clash and play of soul with 
soul that is so miraculously given here. Yet, though the play (which 
some call a comedy!) is not known to have been acted till 1604, its 
general characteristics put it far earlier. 

The second or middle division of plays may be said to be con- 
nected with the first by the link between Henry IV. and Henry V.^ 
the latest and most matured of the early batch, and the Merry Wives 
of Windsor, probably the first of the second. The The middle 
Merry Wives itself is a curious study. It has failed division: the 
to find favour with some, owing to a not ignoble dislike ^'^'^ "'^'^' 
at seeing the degradation or discomfiture of FalstafF, but it must be 
remembered that Shakespeare, though never cruel with the morbid 
cruelty of the modern pessimist, is always perfectly awake to the 
facts of life. And, as a matter of fact, the bowls that Falstaff played 
involve the ruljbers that are here depicted. It has also been a 

'^ It is well to say nothing about Ilcniy VI., because, though I have no doubt 
that this trilogy is, as we have it, in the main Shakespeare's, it is also beyond 
all doubt, and beyond all others, a refashioning of earlier plaj'S. 



324 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 



common saying that the play is little better than a farce. If so, it can 
only be said that Shal-ccspeare very happily took or made the oppor- 
tunity of showing how a farce also can pass under the species of 
eternity. How infinitely do the most farcical of the characters, such 
as Sir Hugh and Dr. Caius, excel the mere "Vices" of earlier play- 
wrights ! Who but Shakespeare had — we may almost say wlio but 
Shakespeare has — made an immortal thing of a mere ass, a mere 
puff-ball of foolish froth like Slender? If Chaucer had had the 
dramatic as he had the narrative faculty and atmosphere, he might 
have done Mrs. Quickly, who is a very near relative, in somewhat 
lower life, of the Wife of Bath, and rapidly ripening for her future 
experiences in Eastcheap. But Shallow is above ev-en Chaucer, as 
are also the subtle differentiation between Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford, 
and the half-dozen strokes which her creator judged sufficient for 
sweet Anne Page. As for Falstaff, it is mistaken affection which 
thinks him degraded, or "translated" Bottom-fashion. He is even 
as elsewhere, tliough under an unluckier star. 

This completeness exhibits itself, not perhaps in more masterly 
fashion, but in a somewhat higher and more varied material, in the 
great trio of Romantic comedies which is supposed to represent the 

work of the last year or two of the sixteenth century — 
^^^omeX^'f''' Tzvdfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, and As You 

Like It. Whether this order represents the actual com- 
position or not, it certainly represents an intellectual and literary 
progression of interest and value, thougli the steps between the three 
are not wide. Twelfth Night, like the Merry Wives though not 
quite to the same extent, is pure comedy with a leaning to farce. 
The exquisite delicacy of the character of Viola suffuses it with a 
more romantic tone ; but the disasters of Malvolio are even less 
serious than Falstaff's, and the great appeal of the play lies wholly 
on the comical side, in the immortal characters of Sir Toby and Sir 
Andrew, in Feste, the first distinctly and peculiarly Shakespearian 
clown, in Maria, the " youngest wren of nine," in the glorious fooling 
of the plot against the steward, and the minor Comedy of Errors put 
upon Viola and Sebastian. There is nq touch of sadness, though the 
clown's final song of " The rain it raineth every day " gives a sort of 
warning note ; the whole is sunny, and if less romantically imaginative 
than A Midstimnter Nighfs Dream, it is almost as romantically 
fanciful. 

MucJi Ado About Nothing clianges us from pure comedy to the 
tragi-comic — indeed, to what threatens at one time to be tragedy 
unililuted. Perhaps here only, or here and in the \Vinter''s Tale, 
Sliakcspcare has used tragedy to heighten his comedy, just as he 
habitually does the opposite ; and the effect is good. But it is for the 



SHAKESPEARE 325 



lighter side — for the peerless farce of Dogberry, the ahiiost peerless 
comedy proper of Benedick and Beatrice — that we love the play. And 
the attraction of this couple, anticipated very early in Rosaline and 
Biron, is vised yet again and with absolutely supreme success in As 
You Like It, one of the topmost things in Shakespeare, the master- 
piece of romantic comedy, one of the great type-dramas of the world. 
Here, as in so many other places, Shakespeare borrowed his theme, and 
even no small part of his minor situations ; but this matters nothing. 
The Tale of Gamely n is pleasant and vigorous ; Lodge's Rosalyiide 
is ingenious and fantastically artistic. But As Yo2t Like It is part 
of the little " library of La Quinte " — of the few books exhibiting 
imagination and expression equally married. Rosalind and Touch- 
stone stand, each in his or her own way, alone. 

The apparent change in the subject and temper of Shakespeare's 
work at the beginning of the seventeenth century has been the 
subject of much idle talk. There is no more reason to believe that he 
was specially and personally merry when he wrote this 
group of comedies, than there is to believe that he was tragedks' 
sad or embittered during the period which produced Roman and 
Julius CcEsar, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony 
and Cleopatra — to which some would add Troilus and Cressida, 
Timon, and even Measure for Measure, as well as Coriolanus. To 
the present writer it is pretty certain that Measure for Measure, 
Timon, and Troilus and Cressida represent much earlier work, 
whether or no they had been actually produced. The three Roman 
plays, Julius Ca^ar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra, make an 
interesting section to themselves, which in Antony and Cleopatra 
almost passes into that of romantic tragedy, and so joins the supreme 
quartette, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear. In all the Roman plays 
Shakespeare applied his English-chronicle method pretty exactly 
to the material that he found in North's Plutarch, and, since his 
faculties both of stage-management and of versification were now in 
complete maturity, with the noblest effect. But in character he does 
not create much, he only interprets — till we come to the '' Serpent of 
old Nile " and her lover, who are neither the crowned wanton and 
besotted debauchee of uninspired history, nor the anti-Roman 
sorceress and victim of Horace's craven-crowing ode, but a real hero 
and heroine of romance, luckless though not blameless, sympathetic 
though not ill served. 

Much, however, even of Antony and Cleopatra is only chronicle, 
and like the other two, great as they are, falls beneath the magnificent 
creation of the four great romantic tragedies. In each of these, 
of course, Shakespeare had again his authorities, and, as his wont, 
he sometimes followed them closely. But the interest Qf the four 



326 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE rk. vi 

does not depend in the very least upon Cinthlo or Saxo, upon 
Geoffrey or Holinshed. Here, as in the great companion comedies, 
the dramatist breaks quite free ; his real themes are human passion 
and liuman action at large, caught and embodied for the nonce in 
individual character and tate. Nowhere else does even Shakespeare 
lavish his resources as he does in these four plays, and certainly in 
none does he manifest such a power of displaying the irony of life 
and fate. Viewed from one standpoint, all four are as well entitled 
to the motto " V^anity of vanities " as Ecclesiastes itself. The love, 
the heroism, and the great leading qualities of Othello and Macbeth, 
tlie filial duty and intellectual subtlety of Hamlet, the generous if 
reckless and passionate botiliomie of Lear, all make shipwreck against 
the rocks thrown in their way by inauspicious stars, and sought out 
too often by their own mistakes and crimes. With that supreme 
genius which distinguishes him from the common playwright, 
Shakespeare has never made his lieroes or lieroines types ; and this 
has puzzled many, and driven not a few to despairing efforts to make 
them out types after all. It is exactly what they are not. Shakespeare 
was no duped or duping preacher of the ruling passion like his 
second editor. Othello is indeed the simplest of the ibur ; but even 
here the character of lago, which is almost as complex as that of 
Hamlet, invites a great, from some the greater, part of the interest. 

Those who would make Hamlet a mere irresolute, a mere 
Waverley, not only do not supply a full explanation of him even in 
their terms, but forget that irresolution, at least such as his, is the 
most complex of qualities. The inability of the will to ''let itself go" 
is partly caused by, much more complicated with, the inability of the 
intellect to decide. To compare Lear with the wretched other play^ 
on the subject, which is beyond all doubt anterior, or with Holinslied, 
or with Geoffrey's original, is perhaps the \ery best single means of 
appreciating the infinite variety and intricacy of Shakespeare's know- 
ledge and expression of humanity. Although the hapless King is 
always in the Latin sense impotent, — incapable of resisting the 
impulse of the moment, — this fault of his is conditioned, coloured, 
transformed at every instant by circumstances, many of them 
Shakespeare's own invention, and all rearranged with new effects by 
him. The gifting, the unexpected fractiousness of Cordelia (and let 
it be. remembered that Cordelia is not a perfect character, that she is 
as hyper-frank as her sisters are hypocritical), the petty insults at 
Goneril's, the bolder outrage at Gloster's under the orders of Regan 
and Cornwall, the terrors of the storm, and the talk (dangerous 
to already tottering wits) of the sham madman, the rescue even as it 

1 To be found, with other similar apparatus, in Ha/.litt's Shakespeare's Library. 



SHAKESPEARE 327 



is too late, the second fall into the hands of his enemies, and the 
final blow in the murder of Cordelia — all these engines, all these 
reagents, the dramatist applies to Lear's headstrong petulance with the 
most unvarying precision of science, the most unfailing variety of 
art. We have the ungovernable king and ex-king in twenty different 
'' states," in twenty different relations and presentments, all connected 
by the central inexorable story. And so in Macbeth the hero — 
ambitious, uxorious, intensely under the influence of nerves and of 
imagination, as different from the mere ''butcher" of Malcolm's 
insult as his greater but not less complex-souled wife is from a 
"fiendlike queen" — passes before us whole and real, terrible but 
exact, before, at the crisis of, and in his criminal stage, at once with 
■the fluttering and phantasmagoric variety of a dream, and with an 
utterly solid and continuous story-interest. The Macbeth who is 
excited by the prophecy of the witches is exactly the same Macbeth 
as he who shrinks from the visioned dagger, as he who is struck to 
a kind of numb philosophising by the cry of women that announces 
his wife's deaths 

Of the numberless and magnificent passages of our poetry which 
these four plays contain it were vain to attempt to speak. It must 
be sufficient to say that in them the Shakespearian line, which, with 
its absolute freedom of shifting the pause from the first syllable to the 
last, its almost absolute freedom of syllabic equivalence, and the infinite 
variety of cadence which the use of these two main means (and no 
doubt some magic besides) allowed it to attain, is the central fact of 
English poetry — this line came to its very farthest. We only observe 
in the plays of the last six or seven years of his life one change, and 
that not a quite certain one, the inclination to greater indulgence in the 
redundant syllable which is so exceedingly noticeable in his successors 
in romantic drama, Beaumont and Fletcher. It is pretty certain that 
this license, which he had always used to some extent, would never in 
Ills hands have reached the excess which we find in them, and which 
in their followers simply disbands the line into loose ungirt prose, 
with some reminiscences of verse here and there. But it cannot be 
considered on the whole an improvement. 

The plays of, or probably belonging to, the last period of Shake- 
speare's life are fewer in proportion than those of either of the pre- 
ceding periods, but those of them that are certain present interesting 
characteristics. These are Cyiubclinc, the Winter''s Tale, 
and The Tempest, the others being Henry VIII. and ^^ ^ ^^^' 
Pei-icles. This last play, which was not included in the first folio 
of 1623 by Shakespeare's friends and colleagues, Heminge and 
Condell, presents curious difficulties. Great part of it must be 
Shakespeare's ; there is perhaps no part that might not be ; and the 



328 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOP.EAN LITERATURE i-.K. vi 



general characteristics of story-management and versification are a 
very odd mixture of his eadiest and his latest manner — a Lmie's 
Labour^s Lost blended with a IVitiier^s Tale. Nor do I at least see 
reason for refusing any part of Henry VIII. to Shakespeare, though 
the prominence of the redundant syllable has made many ascribe it 
in large part to Fletcher. But about the other three there is no 
doubt, and certainly there is more excuse than usual for those who 
read in them a special index of the author's temper in these his last 
days — of the '' calmed and calming mens adcpta " whereof Fulke 
Greville speaks. Cyvtbeline partakes somewhat of the same character 
as the earlier Mitch Ado about Nothing. It is very nearly a 
tragedy — indeed, unlike Much Ado about Nothing., it contains 
accomplished tragic incidents in the deaths of the Queen and 
Cloten. But as far as the interesting personages — Imogen, 
lachimo, Posthumus — are concerned, the tragedy is averted, and 
the whole deserves the name of romantic dra//te in the French 
sense. 

This word, indeed, exactly describes these last three plays, and 
with ever-increasing appropriateness. Pedants of the bookish theoric 
of playwright craftsmanship have found fault with the construction of 
Cynibeline, which is admittedly loose, like its fellows — a chronicle 
or romance rather than an epic, but perfectly sufficient for its own 
object and purposes. The backbone of // li'inter''s Tale is a little 
more carefully and distinctly vertebrated, though no doubt the 
action is rather improbably prolonged, and the statue-scene, in 
which Hermione is restored to Leontes, does not entirely atone by 
its extreme beauty for its equally extreme improbability. But here, 
as always, Shakespeare has done what he meant to do ; and here, as 
always, it is the extremity of critical impertinence to demand from an 
author not what he meant to do but something that the critic thinks 
he might, could, should, or ought to have meant. The vivid truth 
of the Queen's frank courtesy, Leontes' jealous rage (so different from 
Othello's, yet equally lifelike), the fine lurid presentment of the 
•' coast " of Bohemia, the exquisitely idyllic (a word mucli abused, yet 
here applicable) figure of Perdita, the inimitable brio of Autolycus, 
(he pendant to Touchstone — to give all these and other things in 
a pleasing series was what the dramatist intended to do, and he 
did it. 

The splendour of sunset in the Tempest can escape no one, and 
the sternest opponent of guesswork must admit the probable presence 
of a designed allegory in the figure of Pros])ero and the burying of 
the book, the breaking of the staff, at the close. Even if this be 
thought too fanciful, nowhere has Shakespeare been more prodigal 
of every species of his enchantment. The exquisite but contrasted 



CHAP. I SHAKESPEARE 329 

grace of Miranda and Ariel, the wonderful creation of Caliban, the 
varied human criticism in Gonzalo and the bad brothers, the farce- 
comedy of Stephano and Trinculo, do not more show the illimitable 
fancy and creative power of the master in scene and character than 
the passages, not so much scattered as showered over the whole play, 
show his absolute supremacy in poetry. Both in the blank verse and 
the lyrics, in the dialogue and the set tirades, in long contexts 
and short phrases alike, he shows himself absolute, with nothing 
out of reach of his faculty of expression and suggestion, with every 
resource of verbal music and intellectual demonstration at his 
command. 

The so-called doubtful plays ^ of Shakespeare form an interesting 
subject, but one which can be dealt with but briefly here. As 
attributed by older tradition and assertion or by modern guesswork, 
they amount to "some dozen or sixteen," of which only 
three, the Tivo N'oble Kinsmen, usually printed as ^p°iayf"' 
Beaumont and Fletcher's, Ediuard III., and Arden of 
FeversJiani, have any serious claims, though some have seen such in 
the Yorkshire Tragedy, a curious little horror-piece which, however, 
a dozen other men might have written. Others again, Fair Em, 
Locrine, Sir John Oldcastle, have absolutely nothing but unauthoritative 
though pretty ancient assertion to recommend them. As for the 
excepted three, the Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatisation of Chaucer's 
Knights Tale, has no suggestion of Shakespeare as a whole, but in 
parts shows extraordinary similarity to his versification. This has 
tempted some to think that Shakespeare may by chance have found 
his younger contemporaries (Beaumont, be it remembered, died in 
the same year with him) working at the play, have looked at it, and 
have mended or patched here and there for amusement or out of 
good-nature. Edward III. has the same similarities of versification, 
and in part, though a small part, of handling, but it is more 
suggestive of an extraordinarily clever piece of imitation or inspira- 
tion than of actual Shakespearian authorship. Arden of Feversham, 
on the other hand, has no similarities of versification, and does not, 
in its dealing with the murder of a husband by his wife and her base- 
born paramour, suggest Shakespeare's choice of subject, but is closer 
in some ways than any other play to his handling in character and 
psychological analysis. 

1 A complete and cheap Shakespearian "Apocrypha " is much wanted. As it 
is, more or fewer of the doubtfuls are included in some of the old large library 
editions, some of them may be found in Hazlitfs Dodsley, others in Simpson's 
School of Shakespeare, and one or two, especially Arden of Feversha?n, are 
accessible separately. Otherwise the edition of Warnke and Proescholdt (Halle, 
1878-88) is the only good one. 



CHAPTER II 
Shakespeare's contemporaries in drama 

Disposition of the subject — Chronological and biographical cautions — Ben Jonson 

— His and other "humour" — His plays — His verse — The three master- 
pieces — Later plays — The Alasques — • Beaumont and Fletcher — Their lives — 
Their characteristics — And merits — Specimen plays — Shadowy personality of 
other dramatists — Sufificiency of their work — Chapman — Marston — Dekker 

— Middleton — Heywood — Webster — His two great plays — Day — Tourneur 

— Rowley 

From more than one thing which has been said already, it will be 
seen that the arrangement of the great period of the English drama 
for treatment in a literary history is beset by various difficulties. 

The phases come so quick and overlap each other so 
of the'subject. intricately, that separate treatment is apt to create an 

entirely wrong general idea clironologically, while collec- 
tive treatment is in danger of confusing the successive stages. For 
our present purpose the best way will probably be to take here all or 
almost all the men who during Shakespeare's lifetime produced some- 
thing more than the mere beginning of their work, leaving even 
Massinger (though it is almost certain that he wrote before 1616), 
much more Ford, Shirley, etc., for the next Book ; but to preface the 
individual dealings with some warning remarks which may keep the 
general procession clear. 

Let it then be always remembered that the formative period of 
the Lhiiversity Wits was a very short one, and was contained, 
rouglily .speaking, in the decade from 1585 to 1596; that Shakespeare 

overlapped them at the one end, and the first ten years 

"^"and^"^^ of Fletcher — the whole collaboration of Beaumont and 

biographical Fletcher — on the other; that Ben Jonson, beginnincf 

cautions. ./ / o o 

before the Queen's reign ended, by some years, was 
the dramatist more especially of the reign of James, though he 
survived till near the outbreak of the civil dissensions ; that 
Fletcher's death coincided nearly enough with the accession of 
Charles, so that he represents one side of the purely Jacobean 

330 



CHAP. II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 331 

drama as Ben does the other; and that most of the minor but still 
great men, 'Chapman, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, Tourneur, Day, 
Marston, Webster, while often anticipating tlie end of Elizabeth's 
reign, and sometimes prolonging themselves into the beginning of 
Charles's, are still in the main ornaments more especially of 
that of the British Solomon, wlio, for all his Rewlis and Caidilis 
(vide infra), certainly reaped where he had not sown. From what 
has been said already of this curiously tangled character of the 
subject, it will be understood that a strictly chronological arrange- 
ment of the writers enumerated, and others, is practically impossible. 
But it so happens tluxt, without violating chronology in any important 
degree, we can arrange them in an order con-esponding quite closely 
enough to their literary importance. 

Ben Jonson^ (whose non-dramatic poetry is in bulk, and still 
more in intluence, so imjDortant that it must be treated separately in 
the next chapter, while his prose will also come in for handling in a 
third) was nearly ten years younger than Shakespeare, 

, , ■ T 1 • xi i- "^n Jonson. 

and was born m London in the year 1573, some time 
after the death of his father, who was in orders. There seems to be 
no reason for doubting that the family was a branch of the Annan- 
dale Johnstones. He was educated at Westminster, but probably at 
neither University, thougli he afterwards received honorary degrees 
from both. His mother married a master bricklayer or builder, and 
Ben appears to have tried the business, but naturally did not like it. 
He enlisted and served for some time in the Netherlands, but seems 
to have come home while still a boy and to have married very early. 
The famous conversations with Drummond (see below), which though 
not the very best of evidence, are about the best we have, do not 
represent this marriage as a very happy one, though Ben gives his 
wife a somewhat ungracious testimonial on the most important point. 
He was certainly one of the most solidly read men of an erudite time. 
We do not know how he gravitated to the stage, but Meres's mention 
of him is so early (1598) that Every Man in his Humottr, Jonson 's 
earliest known play, is sometimes put before this date. But we do 
not know that it was acted till then, and Meres's commendation is 
for tragedy. The wild life of the actors and playwrights of the time 
had nearly made Jonson's own end tragically premature, for he fought 
a duel with an actor of Henslowe's, Gabriel Spencer, in this same 
year, killed him, was tried for murder, but escaped by pleading 
"clergy" and being burnt in the hand, with loss of goods and chattels, 
which were probably not extensive. During the early years of James 
we know little of him except from the Conversations and a few tradi- 

i Works, ed. Gifford and Cunningliani (3 vols. London, n.d^. 



332 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

tional stories, mostly of literary quarrels. But in the second decade 
of the seventeenth century he became a sort of regular dictator of 
literature, the head of successive groups of young men of letters 
whom he called his "sons," the furnisher, conjointly with Inigo Jones 
as designer and mechanician till they quarrelled, of many court masques, 
which contain exquisite poetry, and Poet Laureate, or something like 
it. The journey to Scotland, in which he visited Drummond at 
Hawthornden, took place in 1619. His last years were not wholly 
happy, for his health, partly owing to his conviviality, was impaired, 
and he was often in straits for money from the fickleness of the court 
and stage favour on which alone he depended. But when he died in 
1637 there was probably no competent opinion which did not regard 
him as the head of English literature, a position which he practically 
held till Dryden was served heir to it. 

Jonson's first play. Every Man in his IJi/niotir (which after 
having been acted at the Rose in a form not now cvtant, tbout 1596, 
was transferred in its present shape to the Globe and acted in by 
Shakespeare two years later), expresses in more than its title the 
kind of drama in which he specially excelled. The successive or 
contemporary senses of the much-discussed word "humour" in 

English can be put shortly without too much assumption 
^''humoun'" on debatable points. Taking its original meaning in 

the modern languages from the medico-philosophical 
sense of "humour" as a constituent of the bodily frame influencing 
health or disease, it passes into the connotation of "temper," "disposi- 
tion," which it still retains. From this, and by a slight reaction and 
variation upon its first meaning, it comes to signify a particular 
idiosyncrasy, — a whim or caprice distinguishing the individual, — and 
it is in this sense that Jonson constantly uses it and illustrates it in- 
his plays. Only much later, and by degrees very difficult to mark 
with any accuracy, did it acquire that sense of distinction from, though 
not opposition to, wit in which it has become the designation of 
a quality so frequently found in English literature and elsewhere — a 
■ feeling and presentation of the ludicrous which does not stop there 
but includes something more, a sympathetic, or at least meditative, 
transcendency. In this last sense Shakespeare is the greatest of all 
humourists, and Jonson has not much claim to be one, for his temper 
was unsympathetic and his intellect, though strong, was a little coarse. 
But in the delineation, never absolutely caricatured, of " humours " in 
the plural form and lesser sense he has had few rivals. 

In Every Man in his Hninour the freshness of the writer's vein 
prevents the tendency to " cul-and-driedncss" to which iiis scheme- 
is exposed, and the result is delightful, especially in the. boasting 
coward Bobadil and the gull Master Stephen, who w.ir" - -^■^■1 to 



CHAP. 11 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 35^ 

be melancholy upon," while the sketches of manners, always the 
strong point of the humour-play, show us almost for the first time an 
interest and a'n excellence which was in both respects one 
of the chief features of the Elizabethan drama out of '^ ^ ^^^' 
Shakespeare. For there is nothing more distinctive of Shakespeare 
than the way in which, despite his intensely English patriotism and 
his intensely English spirit, his painting of manners always transcends 
the merely graphic and local. He has enough of this last for his 
purpose, but only enough, and it was no part of his purpose to indi- 
cate for us accurately the flat cap and shining shoes of the citizen, or 
to make us acquainted with Pickthatch and Hogsden. 

Every Man out of his Humour, which followed in 1599, is un- 
doubtedly open to some of those strictures on sequels which, though 
often applied with undiscriminating woodenness, have some basis of 
experience. The elaborate characterisings of the persons which 
the author thought it necessary to prefix betray a certain suspicion 
that they do not sufficiently explain themselves ; the mostly Italian 
index-names, Deliro, Fallace, Asper, and the rest, are teasing to the 
reader, and slight his memory and his judgment by suggesting that 
the one is too short and the other too feeble to identify tlie specimen 
without the label. \ et there is both fine verse and fine prose in the 
play, and the satire on the word ''humour " itself, which is constantly 
put into the mouths of the characters, shows that Jonson was never 
his own dupe, though he might sometimes be his own mimic. And 
his realism has the advantages of its defects. We might have gone 
all over the London of 1599 without meeting FalstafF (who indeed 
had long been in Arthur's bosom), but we should have had, in all 
probability, no difficulty in finding twenty Fastidious Brisks between 
St. Paul's and Westminster. 

The third play, Cynthia's Revels (1600), is an attempt to follow 
Lyly, but with direct satire on Euphuism itself, and in a harsher, 
harder style than that of the author of Midas. Indeed, Jonson's 
tendency to rough personal attack, and to a self-assertion undoubtedly 
arrogant, though too well justified by his gifts to be absolutely ludicrous, 
was growing on him very fast. And his next play, The Poetaster 
(1601-1602), in which the ostensible characters are those of Augustus 
and his court, was recognised as a direct assault on his own rivals, 
especially Marston and Dekker, while Tucca, the principal comic 
character, was seen at once to be drawn from an actual parasite of 
the time, one Captain Hannam. Yet there is stuff in it, and fine 
stuff, while Jonson's progress in his own style of versifica- 
tion is very marked. This, while it never attains to 
anything like the universal adaptability of Shakespeare's and is 
seldom distinguished by the ease and grace of Fletcher's, has great 



334 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

dignity and rhetorical force not really injured by any compensating 
stiffness. And it served him well in the fine Roman play of Sejatius 
which followed (1603), which was acted in, and at first, perhaps, 
originally contributed to, by Shakespeare, which, except some of the 
masques, contains Jonson's best dramatic verse as verse, and which 
exhibits extraordinary familiarity with the classic originals — a famili- 
arity not resulting, as is too often the case, in any overloading with 
erudition. 

It was, however, in his three next pieces, Volpone, or the Fox, 
Epicene, or the Silent Woman, and The Alchemist that Jonson's 
genius as a dramatist found the fullest scope. To the present 

writer's judgment they seem to present a gradual cres- 
mls'terpieces. cendo of excellence. Strong as is Volpone (in which 

the devices of a rich, wicked, and misanthropic Italian 
to bring shame and disaster on his flatterers and legacy-hunters 
result in his own utter ruin), it is still marred a little by a too great 
separation in the characters (the result of the humour-theory), by the 
unmitigated rascality or folly of almost everybody in it, and by the 
improbability of Volpone's playing a game as dangerous as it was de- 
testable. The Silent Woman was unsparingly admired by its own 
and the following generation for the cunning of its plot, the satisfac- 
tory adjustment of the contributory humours, and the admirable 
character of Morose, the best of all the misanthropes of the modern 
stage. But both plays fall short of The Alchemist. Here is Sir 
Epicure Mammon, the one character of the dramatist who requires 
no allowances and exceptions in the description of him as absolutely 
of the first class, no longer the mere vehicle of a " humour," but the 
incarnation of a human temperament — that in which voluptuous and 
avaricious concupiscence is sublimed and idealised into something 
immortal. Even this great central figure is thoroughly supported by 
the group of his three dcluders, and deluders of each other, Subtle, 
Dol, and Face, while all the minor charactef-s, especially Abel Drugger 
(later Garrick's best character), are good, and the story of the play 
moves with a combination of exactness and alacrity rare in any writer, 
and particularly rare in Jonson. There is perhaps nq old play which 
inspires even tho.se who are not fanatically devoted to the theatre with 
such a desire to see it performed as this does, owing to the excellence 
of the stage-situations, though there is hardly any which, from the 
sensuous enthusiasm of Sir Epicure and the brazen yet not vulgar 
audacity of Dol, his '-princess," to the fatuity of Drugger and the 
petulance of the Angry Boy, would require so powerful a cast. 

As the great trio was led up to by one of Jonson's Roman plays, 
Sejanus, so the descent from it — for his later plays, though even at 
the worst not what Dryden in his rare moment of unkindness called 



CHAi'. II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMrORARIES IN DRAMA 335 

'* dotages," arc a descent — was begun by the other, Catiline^ a 
piece which is critically on a level with its pendant in force, learn- 
ing, and a certain stiffness. There is no stiffness in 
BartJiolomew Fair, which followed Catiline, but it is ^ '^'^ p ^y*"- 
rather an immense and audacious force, dealing with the Puritans 
and the general humours of holiday London in a fashion excellently 
vigorous though undeniably coarse, than a comedy. The Devil is an 
Ass soars higher in scheme and kind. It is a comedy with a 
purpose, and a rather ambitious and hazardous one, being in effect a 
satire, as Giflford says, on monopolists and projectors on the one 
hand, on witch-finders and sham demoniacs on the other. After this 
there appears to have been a very long gap in Jonson's productions 
for the regular stage, though he was fertile in masques. When he re- 
appeared on the boards in 1625, with The Staple of News, there was 
no great if any perceptible falling off either in wit, in satire, or in the 
vivid portrayal of the " humours." But of his last three plays. The 
New Inn, The Magnetic Lady, and the Tale of a Tub, the first was 
definitely damned, with the result of an indignant protest from the 
poet and divers replies, consolatory or otherwise, from other writers. 
The second had a mixed reception, and it is not known whether the 
third was ever acted publicly, though it certainly did not please when 
performed at court. Nor in any of the cases, despite passages and 
characters of merit, can they be said to do full justice to the author's 
powers. That these powers were, however, by no means gone is 
shown by his last and unfinished work, The Sad Shepherd, a pastoral 
drama fancifully blended of tlie story of Robin Hood and a fairy tale, 
which is one of the most exquisite things of the Elizabethan age — 
the " satire, wit, and strength " which, far more than to Wycherley, 
may be attributed to its author being here accompanied by a sweet- 
ness and poetical charm, discoverable indeed in his minor poetical 
productions, but seldom to be observed even in his greatest plays. 

Between the poems ^nd the plays, but connected with the latter 
by the Sad Shepherd itself, come the Masques,'^ the most consider- 
able body of that kind, both as to bulk and as to excellence, to be 
found in English. IVIuch has been written, without 
much being determined, on the origin of the masque '^ ' trsi/ues. 
itself, which was very probably Italian. But the thing is so natural 
a growth in the conditions which made diamatic entertainments the 
particular amusement of courts, that it requires no elaborate or pre- 
cise pedigree. It may be described as a dramatic entertainment in 
which plot, character, and even to a great extent dialogue are sub- 
ordinated on the one hand to spectacular illustration, and on the other 

1 Mr. H. A. Evans's English Masques (London, 1897) contains a good selec- 
tion of others besides Jonson's. 



336 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LTFERATURE bk. vi 

to musical accompaniment. It was thus a sort of precursor of the 
opera, and disappeared when the opera became popular. The seven- 
teenth century, and especially the first half thereof, was the palmy 
time of the masque in England. Of these pieces Ben Jonson has 
left us nearly forty. ^ Most of them, as mentioned, were written in 
conjunction with Inigo Jones, who supplied the decorations, going far 
beyond mere scenery and dresses, and such as must often have taxed 
the utmost ingenuity even of a consummate architect and engineer. 
Special dancing-masters (a profession of importance at the time) 
arranged the choregraphy, and the best composers, such as Ferra- 
bosco and Lanier, gave the music for these entertainments, on which 
sums representing scores of thousands of pounds in our money were 
lavished. But no expense could be more than worthy of the inex- 
haustible supplies of wit, learning, and real poetry on which Jonson 
drew unsparingly for tlie libretti. If Milton, as he undoubtedly did, 
bettered Jonson's instruction in Co/nus and the Arcades, yet it was 
Jonson's instruction that he bettered, and by far less than is com- 
monly thought. For hardly any one now reads these charming 
pieces, couched in an obsolete form and burdened with the rubbish, 
as it now is, of stage directions and stage business, but displaying in 
the dialogue constant felicity, and in the abundant lyrics that very 
sober grace and half-demure elegance of craftsmanship by which 
Milton has won not the worst or least genuine part of his own 
fame. 

The work of Beaumont and Fletcher ^ is even more voluminous 
than that of Jonson ; it is indeed the most voluminous of any that 
we liave from the greater figures of our drama, so that to go through 
it here on the same scale as that which has been allowed 
ancTFlTtche'r. ^o Ben would be impossible. It would also be unneces- 
sary, for their plays are much more homogeneous than 
his in general conception. Tliey are, with hardly an exception, 
romantic comedies or romantic tragedies, differing remarkably from 
Shakespeare's in their ethics, and usually in their versification, but 
distantly belonging to the same general group in scheme, and sub- 
ordinating all their subjects, classical, modern, fantastic, or historical, 
to this general scheme. The lives of the pair are not much known, 

1 The very titles of these, in a phrase of their author's, "speak them" — 
"The Masque of Blackness" (1605), " Love Restored " (1610), " For the 
Honour of Wales," " N^'ptune's Triumph," "The Fortunate Isles," etc. 

■-2 The twin dramatists have not been re-edited as wholes since the editions of 
Darley (2 vols.) and Dyce (n vols.) in the forties. The former is the cheapest, 
the latter the most authoritative. A fairly full selection of complete plays will be 
found in 2 vols, of the " Mermaid Series " edited by Mr. St. Loe Strachey, But 
the last century edition of 1750 (10 vols.), by various editors, though not very 
critical, is as useful as any. Tiiat by Weber, Scott's secretary, is about the worst. 



CHAP. II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 



and the distribution of the dramatic work which commonly goes 
under tlieir joint names is extremely uncertain, though from Beau- 
mont's very short life he can hardly have had much of a hand in the 
majority of it. The traditional allotment of the part of creator to 
Fletcher and of critic to Beaumont rests on no solid authority, and is 
a sort of commonplace in reference to such collaborations. 

John Fletcher, the elder, the longer-lived, and undoubtedly the 
more prolific of the two, though perhaps not the greater genius, 
belonged to a remarkable literary family, though the power was not 
so much shown in his father (who, as Dean of Peter- ^, . ,. 

, Tncir livGS. 

borough, made himself unpleasantly notorious at the exe- 
cution of Queen Mary, and died Bishop of London) as in his uncle, 
Giles Fletcher, the author of Licia, and his cousins, Giles and 
Phineas, the not too unequal followers of Spenser (^vide infra). The 
bishop died poor, and his son, who had entered Benet or Corpus 
College at Cambridge early, was left to shift for himself at seventeen. 
We know nothing of him personally ; but the anecdote in Shad- 
well's Bujy Fair-, which presents him as living in lodgings with 
one maid-servant, who, when he entertained friends, " had her sack 
in a beer-glass," is quite likely to be an actual tradition, for the 
forte of " Og " was not inventiveness. For some time, we are 
told, he and his partner in the dramas lived together. He died 
of the plague in August 1625. Francis Beaumont was the son of a 
Justice of the Common Pleas, and belonged to a good family in 
Leicestershire, in which county he was born at Gracedieu in 1584. 
He became a member of Broadgates Hall (afterwards Pembroke 
College) Oxford, in 1597, and entered the Inner Temple in 1600. 
Beaumont was an intimate friend not merely of Fletcher but of 
Jonson, to whom he wrote a very remarkable ode. He married in 
161 3, and died three years later. Except Sahnacis and Hcrniapliro- 
ditns, an Ovidian paraphrase in the luscious school of which Shake- 
speare's two great poems and Marlowe's Hej'o and Leatider are the 
chief, and the anonymous Br Haiti's Ida the next best, Beaumont's 
poetical work is very uncertain, and the collections which go under 
his name (reproduced in Chalmers) are a mere medley of work, 
sometimes certainly, often probably, belonging to others. But the 
contemporary estimate of his poetical genius was very high, and he 
traditionally has the credit of most, if not all, of the exquisite songs 
which are scattered about the plays, while Fletcher in the same tradi- 
tion contents himself with drama only. 

As guesswork is kept out of this book as much as possible, no 
space will be given to the attempts which have been made (in hardly 
any case upon documentary evidence) to assign the authorship of the 
great total of fifty-two plays to Fletcher, Beaumont and Fletcher, 



338 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LLrERATURE rk. vi 



Beaumont and Fletcher and Shakespeare, Fletcher and Massinger, 
Fletcher and Shirley, Fletcher and Rowley. It is sufficient to say 
that in the whole there is sufficient similarity, and in almost every 
individual play there is sufficient elasticity and variety of manner, 
to make such distributions extremely hazardous, if not utterly idle. 
About F/iilaster, The MaicVs Tragedy, and A King Kind no King, 
there can be no reasonable dispute ; because the ascription of joint 
authorsliip to them is older than Fletcher's death. And it so happens 
that these three plays furnish a sufficient range both of comic and 
tragic handling and expression to enable us to separate the special 
joint quality of the collaboration. Nor is this wanting in any one of 
the others. 1 

In verse these plays tend to a looser style, and admit more 
redundant syllables, than those of Ben or even of Shakespeare ; and 
we have spoken of their general scheme as dramas. There is room 

for somewhat more discussion as to their temper and 
^^te'rist'icT*^ morality. This has been as a rule rather unfavourably 

spoken of, and it is true that the authors neither observe 
the bare poetical justice which is one of the notes of Jonson, nor that 
higher, more impartial ethic — admitting the actual conditions of life 
and fate, but always making for righteousness — which is one of the 
greatest glories of Shakespeare. Their sentiment, though frequently 
exquisite, as in P/iilaster, The Maid''s Tragedy, Thierry and Theodoret, 
and elsewhere, is often if not always slightly strained and morbid, 
the pathos is, so to speak, " loaded," and the situations which bring 
it about are not always natural. Towards what is commonly and 
widely called " vice " they hold an attitude which, while it never even 
approaches the prurient and deliberate provocation of the Restoration 
drama, comes nearer to sympathy than the Olympian acknowledg- 
ment of Shakespeare, or the humorous tolerance of Fielding. In 
mere language they are no coarser than their fellows ; and Dryden 
committed the proverbial blunder of self-excusers when he tried to 
shelter himself, and his fellow-sinners at the other end of the century, 
under even the exceedingly broad shield of the Custom of the Country- 
But it may be that the moral standard, to adopt the favourite phrase, 
is a little lowered in them, the moral currency a little debased. 
Indeed, this is almost implied in the fact that they were, and long 
continued to be, the most popular of all English dramatists, their 
plays not merely surviving the Restoration and its change of taste, 
but even the reaction from that change itself, and holding the stage 
all through the eighteenth century, and well into the nineteenth. 
This, while a testimony to their stage-craft on one side, and on 

1 A brief reasoned cafnlogiie of the whole will be found in my Elizabethan Lit- 
erature, pp. 258-266. 



CHAP. II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 339 

another to a certain kind of nature, is on another also evidence of a 
certain vulgarity — though not in the worst sense of the word. 

At the same time, their merits are exceedingly great. The 
wonderful copiousness, variety, and, with inevitable inequality, 
freedom from failure, of this vast collection of plays must strike every 
reader. In one point, — a delightful feature common, 

, , ■ 1 , ,1 ,• ,1 1 • 1 .1 And merits. 

though not universal, at the time, — the songs which they 
contain, they not seldom come near Shakespeare in quality, while in 
this particular respect they exceed him in quantity and variety. 
Indeed, it is not quite certain whether one of the most exquisite ^ of 
this entire section of literature is Shakespeare's or theirs. They 
brought on the stage a crew of harum-scarum, but not ungenerous 
young men ; of lively, merry, but not unmaidenly or unladylike girls ; 
who are very natural and agreeable people to keep stage company 
with. As distinguished from the merely chaotic construction of the 
earlier drama, and the correct but slightly ponderous and elaborately 
geared machinery of Jonson, their arrangement of plot and incident 
is at once workmanlike and easy. Nor, though it would be impossible 
to go through all their plays, must we omit more particular notice of 
some. 

Perhaps the most general favourite of all, certainly that which 
has the prettiest passages, and which gives the best example of the 
authors' peculiar variety of romantic play, is Pliilaster, a tragi- 
comedy which turns on the causeless jealousy of the 
hero and the faithfulness of his love, who, in the ^p^ay"^" 
disguise of the page Bellario, follows him. The situa- 
tion, which was, of course, much favoured by the practice, universal 
before the closing of the theatres, of committing women's parts to 
boys, took the public fancy, and was much imitated ; but the charm 
of the play is quite independent of it, and though far more unreal 
and merely literary than that of not wholly dissimilar things in Shake- 
speare, is perhaps, in its special and lower kind, unique in English 
literature. This same taint or haut-goi)t, whichever it be preferred 
to call it, of unreality, and morbid or hectic sentiment, appears with 
a more tragic cast, but with not less, or little less, of its own 
peculiar success, in another of the undoubted joint works, The Maid'^s 
Tragedy. The authors have here appealed to some of the most 
affecting, though not the most simply or naturally affecting, motives 
tliat the playwright can bring into action — the conflict of friendship 
between Melantius and Amintor, the strain on the former's loyalty 
when his sovereign's mistress (not even a cast mistress) Evadne is 
put off on him, and the anguished innocence of Aspatia. The 
pathos, and even in a sense the power, of the working out of these is 
1 " Roses, their sharp spines being gone." 



340 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE hk. vi 



assisted by very many passages of really exquisite poetry. In neither 
of tliese plays is there much pure comedy, but in A Kitig and no 
King there is a serious part and a comic one, both good, and the 
latter containing tlie famous braggart Bessus, who makes up the 
great trinity of the English stage in this kind of part with ParoUes 
and Bobadil. The Scornful Lady, which is usually attributed to 
Fletcher alone, is comic merely, and not only supplies comedy of a 
\'ery high order, but had an immense influence on following genera- 
tions down to, and perhaps even later than, Sheridan. The best 
pair with this is the eciually famous Humorous Lieutenant, which 
inclines a little more in the direction of farce. Of plays approaching 
and sometimes reaching the first class there must be mentioned 
among the comedies Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, with its famous 
character of the '• Copper Captain " ; TJie Little FrencJi Lawyer, 
Monsieur llionias, The Cliances, The Wild Goose Chase, and that 
most agreeable burlesque The Knight of the Bnrnitig Pestle ; among 
the tragedies 77ie False One, Valentinian, Thierry and Tlicodorct, and 
Boadicea, each of which has one or more characters, and many more 
than one or two passages, of astonishing merit. The Ttuo Arable 
Kinsmen would hardly rank very high, if it were not for the regular 
echo of Shakespearian verse which here and there meets us; but The 
Faithful Shepherdess, of which again Fletcher has the sole credit, is 
a most charming production, less pathetic, perhaps, than Jonson's com- 
panion fragment above noted, but more complete and not less sweet. 
And it may also be said that in the whole half-century and more 
of plays there is hardly one, even of the weakest, where examples may 
not be found not merely of that strange "joint-stock poetry," as 
Scott, I think, once well described it, which is common to almost the 
whole Elizabethan drama from the highest to the lowest, but of 
special and peculiar music. Again, in a favourite catchword of their 
own day, they had "wit at will." On the merely humorous side it 
was almost as verbally felicitous as that of Congreve, and far more 
pbundant, succulent, and various in its application; on the critical 
side it comes short of the very greatest only by an indefinite quantity. 
For the greater part of the nineteenth century, until very lately, they 
have paid by a certain slighting for their immense and enduring 
vogue during two centuries earlier. But with all their drawbacks, 
all the slight tokens of " decadence " in them, they must be ranked 
so high that none except der Einzige can be put above them. 

Of the personal history of those writers who will occupy the rest 
of this chapter almost incredibly little is known, the amount in some 
cases extending not much beyond the bare name, without any certain 
dates, and with not much certainty of authorsldp, while in hardly any 
case does it extend beyond the barest outline of a life. George Chap- 



CHAi>. II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMrORARIES IN DRAMA 341 

man was probably born at or near Hitchin in or about 1558, became 
a member of the University of Oxford in 1574, was l<nown as a 
dramatist soon after tlie beginning of the last decade 
of the century, was a good friend of Jonson's, with pfrsotality 
whom and Marston he got into trouble in 1613 for a ofother 
supposed insult to the Scotch in Eastward Ho, was 
patronised by Prince Henry and by James's favourite Carr, wrote 
plays, poems, and translations for many years, and died in or about 
1634. John Marston (birth-date unknown, but of a good family in 
the Midlands) was educated at Coventry School and at Brasenose 
College, wrote poems and satires before the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, and plays after it, was beaten by Jonson, and had his 
pistol taken from him (Ben teste'), took orders late, became vicar of 
Christchurch, and died in the same year with Chapman. Of Thomas 
Dekker we know no date, no fact, no anecdote, nothing at all, except 
that by his own statement in 1637 he was threescore or thereabouts. 
John Webster is in similar case, it being merely a guess that he was, 
as some one of his name certainly was, parish clerk of St. Andrew's, 
Holborn. Of Thomas Middleton we know a little more, which, how- 
ever, includes neither the certain date nor the place of his birth 
(London and 1570 appear probable) nor his education. He began 
to write paraphrases and satires before 1600, passed like others into 
playwriting, was chronographer to the City of London in 1620, and 
in 1623 imprisoned for the attack on Gondomar in his Came of Chess. 
He died at Newington Butts, in 1627, and left a widow named 
Magdalen. Of Heywood, another Thomas, we know little or nothing, 
save that he came from Lincolnshire and was a fellow of Peterhouse, 
Cambridge. Of John Day, little save that he was a member of Gon- 
ville and Caius College, in the same University. Of Cyril Tourneur 
literally nothing at all. 

Fortunately, however, if we know little about the men, which is a 
matter of slight consequence, or none at all, to literature, we know a 
good deal about the works, which are of the highest consequence. 
Much is no doubt lost, very few MS. dramas having Sufficiency 
escaped the rough usage in the original stage, the care- of their 
lessness of the fifty years or more when such things were ^""^ ' 
regarded as rubbish, and the ix)sitive destruction which occurred in 
at least one notorious case (that of the herald Warburton, whose 
cook used up old plays for household purposes), and beyond all ques- 
tion in scores of unrecorded ones. Even of those which got into 
print there has been loss. But nevertheless there is no author of 
Elizabethan drama whom there is any reason to believe to have been 
really remarkable, and of whom we have not more or less ample 
remains. The actual amount varies from the two dramas of Tourneur 



342 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

to the two or three dozen — remnants of between two and three 
hundred — of Heywood. And while we have thus sufficient material 
for discerning the idiosyncrasies of individuals, the total mass of 
matter is so great and so varied that we are very unlikely indeed to 
miss specimens of any general kind. 

The dramatic work of Chapman, ^ almost first made and almost 

latest left of all the knights of this Round Table, includes no single 

play of very commanding excellence, and is distinguished, even in 

this period, for want of finish. But in individual passages 

Chapman. . , ,' , , . _^ . , ,. , 

It shows the same great though insufficiently co-ordmated 
and organised power which animates his poems and translations, and 
it includes one of those interesting series of mainly chronicle plays ") 
which form one of the most remarkable features of the whole subject, j 
Bussy d\4i/ibois, Tlie Revenge of Bussy (VADibois, Byro)i's Conspiracy, 
The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, and TJie Tragedy of Philip 
Chabofy Admiral of France, all dealing with the nearly contemporary 
history of a neighbouring country, show, when regarded from one 
point of view, how the drama was striving to do the part of the 
uninvented newspaper and the still rudimentary novel. They even 
give the latest instances of the early " Titanic " style of Elizabethan 
drama. Chapman was connected in more than one literary way with 
Marlowe, whose Hero and Leander he finished ; and while his best 
tragic passages preserve not a little of the "thunder-smoke" of his 
great predecessor, it is noteworthy that, by the confession of the 
greatest writer of the next age, they had considerable influence on 
what we unkindly call the rant of Dryden's own heroic drama. Good 
examples of Chapman's tragic power are almost confined to these 
plays, the later tragedies of Ccesar and Ponipey, Alphonsiis Emperor 
of Germany, and Revenge for Honour being unworthy of their author, 
if indeed the two last be his at all. But in the Blind Beggar of 
Alexandria, An Humorous Day''s Mirth, The Gentleman Usher, 
Monsieur d'Olive (a kind of farcical offshoot of the French history 
series). The IVidow's Tears, and, above all, All Fools and Alay Day, 
Chapman shows very satisfactory comic power. These plays, with 
Eastward Ho, in which, it must be remembered, he collaborated, 
place him high in the exposition of a kind of comedy less compact of 
mere humours than Jonson's, and if less airily gay than Fletcher's, 
and less saturated with poetry than Shakespeare's, yet exceeding in 
these various qualities the work of most other men. 

There is little gaiety — less than in Jonson himself — in the third 
shareholder in Eastivard Ho and its misfortunes. Marston - began 

1 Works, ed. R. H. Shepherd, with Essay by Mr. Swinburne, 3 vols. 
London, 1875. 

2 Ed. Halliwell, 3 vols. London, 1856; ed. BuUen, 3 vols. London, 1887. 



CHAP. II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMrORARIES IN DRAMA 343 

as a satirist ; and botli the deliberate misanthroi^y of thought and the 
not always well carried-off extravagance of expression which mark his 
satires distinguish his plays pretty nearly throughout. 
The two parts of Antonio and Mellida might, for the 
sanguinary inconsequence of the plot and the high-strung and hectoring 
tone of the language, have been written some dozen or sixteen years 
earlier than they actually were. There is good poetry in the play, 
but hardly good drama. The subject of SopJionisba, which was 
particularly tempting to tlie more melodramatic dramatists of the 
seventeenth century in several countries, naturally did not tame 
Marston's disposition to horrors in incident and rant in language ; 
but it kept him more to the point, and permitted fewer alarums and 
excursions. His masterpiece, however, must be sought either in 
What You Will, a comedy which could not be a more complete 
contrast to Shakespeare's play of the name, but which had distinct 
merits, or else in The Malcontent, a satirical play of the same stamp 
as Jonson's, Moliere's, and Wycheiiey's, representing an honest 
misanthrope. Parasitaster and The Dutch Courtesan are inferior; 
while if The Insatiate Countess be his, it most certainly does not do 
him much credit. It was Marston's great misfortune that to a decided 
want of range he joined an intensity which is not itself entirely free 
from suspicions of affectation. His readers not only, like Lamb with 
Hazlitt, '' wish he would not quarrel with the world at the rate he 
does," but sometimes doubt whether Marston really thought so badly 
of human nature as he seems to do. Nevertheless, he is by no means 
destitute of the towering strain of his pi^edecessors and earlier con- 
temporaries, and his gloomy rhetoric not very seldom becomes real 
eloquence. 

No greater contrast of tone and temper could be imagined than 
that which is actually presented in the works of Marston and in those 
of his colleague in the unknown proceedings which drew down on 
both the wrath of Ben Jonson. Nor, looking at Dekker^ 
from another point of view, does any writer of the time 
illustrate more strikingly that other contrast which has been referred 
to, the contrast between the abundant literary and the almost non- 
existent biographical documents about these men. Of Dekker the 
man, we know, as has been said, as nearly as possible nothing ; from 
Dekker the writer, we have not only an abundant body of prose work 
which will be noticed below, but a plentiful collection of inlays, some- 
times written in conjunction with other men, but often enough inde- 
pendent. Moreover, it so happens, and luckily, that by putting 
together this last work, his work in collaboration, and the work 

1 Plays (ed. R. H. Shepherd?), 4 vols. London, 1873; Prose, ed. Grosart, 
5 vols, privately printed, 1884. 



344 I'ATER F:L1ZABE:THAN and JACOBEAN LITERATURE hk. vi 



either alone or with others of his collaborators, we can obtain an idea 
of his own literary temper and genius which is almost logically 
demonstrable. There is no evidence that he had any connection 
with the Universities, with the Inns of Court, or with any learned 
profession, or, as commonly reputed, respectable means of livelihood. 
He seems to have been simply a working dramatist and man of 
letters, an inhabitant of the earlier and more romantic, but not more 
fortunate, Grub Street. For some forty years he appears to have 
written plays and pamphlets, the direct ancestors and representatives 
of the novels and the newspapers by which his kind live, sometimes 
in splendour, often in decent comfort, to-day. It is certain that 
Dekker did not live in splendour, and probable that he did not often 
live in comfort. But he displays in his prose works great talent for 
observation and descriptive narration, and in his plays a most 
charming dramatic genius, a little, as is the wont of the time, chaotic 
and irregular, but sweet and pathetic, as is no contemporary save the 
master of all, especially in the delineation of women's characters, 
while he has both blank verse and lyric touches and flashes, not 
seldom well sustained, of divinest poetry. In the plays that are 
attributed to him in part or ascribed to him by guess, such as the 
Virgin Martyr, which appears in Massinger's works, and the Witch 
of Edinojiton, these characteristics are seen ; but they are more 
eminently visible in his own undoubted plays, The Shoeinaker'^s Holi- 
day, Patient Grissii, Satironiastix, Old Fortunatus, and The Honest 
Whore. It is sufficient proof of Dekker's po\ver in this way that in 
The Shoetnaker'^s Holiday and Satironiastix neither the clumsy com- 
posite device then in favour, of blending or rather strapping together 
(for there is practically no blend) a serious and a comic plot, in both, 
nor in the latter, the desire to hit back at Jonson for his attack in The 
Poetaster, prevents the display of it. Old Fortutiatus, the well-known 
story of the wishing-cap and other gifts, is his chief exploit in purely 
romantic and fanciful drama, and though chaotic beyond even his 
wont, has wonderful force and fancy. Patient Grissil and The 
Honest Whore — the former based, of course, on Boccaccio, the latter 
taking for heroine a woman who has lost her reputation, but retrieves 
it by her patience, constancy, and inviolable purity after marriage — 
are the great texts for Dekker's dealing with the characters of women, 
and the latter shows a felicity of conception and power of execution 
of which the very greatest dramatists might be proud. Nor docs 
Dekker rank much below Shakespeare or Fletcher for his lyrics, the 
best of which, " Cold's the wind and wet's the rain," " Fortune's 
smiles cry Holiday ! " " Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden 
slumbers," " Cast away care," and others, are better known than the 
plays containing them. 



CHAi'. u SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 345 

Middleton, confining himself, or nearly so, to drama, was even a 
more voluminous playwright than Deklcer, at least so far as extant 
pieces are concerned, his works extendinsj in the best 

,• ■ -1 1 1 »i , I 1,- r- 1 Middleton. 

edition to eight volumes.^ Apout halt a score 01 these are 
examples of those dramas of manners of which, as has been said, the 
Elizabethan dramatists other than Shakespeare have left us so many. 
No one of these '^ is very much above or very much below the others ; 
indeed, Middleton, while rather rarely reaching or approaching the 
highest rank, seldom drops so low as most of his fellows occasionally 
do. Yet he was capable of much better work than this journalist 
drama, as it may be called, and he showed it in nearly as many more 
plays written chiefly in collaboration with Dekker or Rowley, but 
distinguished very remarkably from their independent work. At the 
head of these stands the great play of T/ie Chaiigelitig, where, as 
indeed usually in these mixed plays, the comic part is nearly worth- 
less, while the tragic contains, in the characters of the heroine, 
Beatrice-Joanna and her — he can hardly be called lover — but first tool 
and then tyrant, the bravo De Flores, some of the greatest things out 
of Shakespeare. So, too. The Mayor of Quceiiboroitgh, comically 
despicable, or at least commonplace, takes for the tragic subject 
Vortiger's passion for Rowena, and determination to get rid of his 
wife Castiza, and treats it with the same intensity and nearly the 
same wonderful projection of character. Wonten beware ll^o/nen, 
sometimes spoken of as his masterpiece, is a tragedy more domestic 
in type than those, and less lurid, but almost equally, though more 
quietly, intense ; and The Witch has interest besides the remarkable 
IDi'oblem of its relation to Macbeth. A Fair Quarrel has received 
very high praise from some, but seems to others distinctly below 
these. But the political attractions of A Game of Chess are not its 
only ones ; and TJie Spanish Gipsy is a romantic comedy which 
deserves to stand not too far below As You Like It, Middleton 
having for once transcended mere manners and humours, shaken off 
the atmosphere of Fleet Street and Duke Humphrey's tomb, avoided 
the way of extravagant tragedy, and hit upon that — less trodden but 
almost certain to lead the due feet to success — of romance crossed 
with or expressed in drama. 

In the voluminous work of Hey wood, the '■ prose Shakespeare " of 
Lamb (a phrase which has been a good deal misunderstood), there 
are less definite and eminent qualities than in that of almost any 
man yet mentioned in this chapter. He wrote much else besides 

1 Ed. Bullen, 8 vols. London, 1885. 

2 Blurt, Master Constable, Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One, 
The Family of Love, A Mad World, my Masters, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 
Anything for a Quiet Life, etc. 



346 LATER ELIZABEFHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

plays, but his non-dramatic work is almost entirely forgotten, and of 
his dramatic it can hardly be said that more than one piece, the famous 
A II 'oiiian Killed ivith Kindness, survives as much more 
than a name. This has for theme the difficult and 
dangerous subject of the self-restraint, and — though not tolerance — 
charity of the betrayed husband Frankford. And Heywood has 
plucked safety and success from danger by the extreme pathos and 
tenderness with which he treats a rather impossible situation. Else- 
where, though never quite contemptible, he is seldom great. His 
chronicle plays (^Edward IV. and The Troubles of Queen Elisabef/i, 
each in two parts) exhibit the want of unity which is the drawback 
of their kind, without the panoramic and historical-novel eflfect which 
can lie got out of them by those who know how. His dramatisations 
of the Metamorphoses and other such things show a continuance of 
the earlier confusion as to what is and what is not matter for drama, 
which is rare after the beginning of the seventeenth century ; while 
his masques and pageants entirely lack the grace and fancy, mixed 
with learning, which save spectacles in the hands of Jonson. He is, 
however, fairly strong in the comedy of London manners and humours, 
and very strong in the domestic drama, of which his already 
mentioned masterpiece may claim to be our chief instance. Nor has 
he small command of another, not the least agreeable of the sub- 
varieties of the plays of the time, the adventure-drama, of which he 
has left us some remarkable specimens. ^ He is not a great master 
of versification, and one is apt to be more convinced of the "prose" 
than of the '' Shakespeare " in Lamb's dictum. Yet, as if to show in a 
single instance the truth well put in Scott's observation quoted above, 
some of the very finest things of the whole body are his. 

In all respects John Webster- is the direct opposite to Heywood. 

The work attributed to him is fairly voluminous, and we know that 

some, perhaps much, is lost ; but a good deal both of the extant and 

non-extant work attributed to him seems to have been 

Webster. 

done in collaboration, and very little of this, as we now 
have it, is worth mucli. But two very great plays, Vittoria Corombona, 
or the IVhite Devil, and the Duchess of Malfy, and two lesser ones, 
the Devil's Law Case and Appius and Viri^inia, are ascribed to him, 
without assertion or suggestion of any helper. Appius and Virginia 
is a classical tragedy, showing neither the learning and dignity of 

1 The Fair Maid of the Exchange, the Fair Maid of the West, The English 
Traveller, A Challenge for Beauty, Fortune by Land and Sea, A Royal King 
and Loyal Subject, may represent these two classes. Indeed, we have between 
twenty and thirty plays of Heywood's reprinted (6 vols. London, 1874), and his 
actual production (much of it, no doubt, adaptation only) was some ten times as 
large. 

2 Ed. Dyce, i vol. London. 



CHAP. II SHAKESrEARE'S CONTEMrORARIES IN DRAMA 347 

Jonson's nor the universal humanity of Sliakespeare's attempts in 
this style ; and the DcvWs Law Case, though attractive in parts, 
has a treble portion of the chaotic defect of the time. But the first 
pair would suffice to put Webster in the very first rank. All the four, 
as well as most of the remaining work attributed to him, and the titles 
of some that are lost, imply a remarkable tendency to gloom, and to 
supernatural as well as natural terror and horror. He has left us, in 
the '• Address to the Reader " of the IVJiite Devil, a curious apprecia- 
tion of the seven contemporary dramatists, whom he seems to have 
ranked highest, and though the language (especially taken with his 
own caveat) must not be strained too far, yet it may be suspected that 
his classification of Shakespeare with Dekker and Heywood, and the 
particular phrase ^ he selects for them, may have something to do 
with the general, though not universal, cheerfulness which prevails in 
all three. 

Of cheerfulness Webster himself knows nothing; his comedy, 
wherever he attempts it, is a forced guffaw, his passion of love, 
though powerful, has nothing bright or ethereal about it, but shares 
the luridness of his other motives ; and he is most at 
home in the horrors, almost unmitigated, of his two great '^piays^*^^^' 
plays. The White De^iil (printed 161 2) is founded with 
extreme closeness, and only a few dramatic and nobler embellish- 
ments, on the historical story of Vittoria Corombona (or rather 
Accoramboni), which may be found, told by the late Mr. T. A. 
Trollope, in an early number of Dickens's All the Year Round. The 
heroine is an Italian Helen, whose beauty and unscrupulousness 
bring murder and crime wherever she goes, and who is seconded or 
egged on in her evil deeds by her brother Flamineo, a ruffian who, 
though less human and natural than lago, De Flores, or even 
Aaron, in Titus Andronicus, completes the quartette brilliantly, and 
so stands far above all others. The action is so extremely compressed 
as to have the appearance of confusion, but it is in reality clear 
enough ; and many of the separate scenes and passages have a 
gloomy intensity of passion difficult to parallel elsewhere, except in 
the companion play. The mad scene of Cornelia, Vittoria's mother, 
with her dirge over her son Marcello, murdered by his brother 
Flamineo, has received deserved praise from all for its wonderful 
" eeriness " ; but perhaps Vittoria's own words after she has been 
mortally stabbed — 

My soul, like to a ship in a dark storm, 

Is driven I know not whither, 

1 " Right happy and copious industry." He had assigned a "full and 
heightened style "to Chapman, "laboured and understanding work" to Jonson, 
and " no less worthy companions " to Beaumont and Fletcher. 



348 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

rank even higher for tlieir attainment of the greatest j^oetical effect 
with the simplest hmguage and the least out-of-the-way imagery. 

The Duchess of Malfy (printed 1623), the story of whicli was no 
doubt taken from that usual storehouse of the Elizabethan dramatist, 
Painter's Palace of Pleasure, is of less concentrated attraction. The 
heroine marries her steward, and is persecuted for it by her brothers. 
They employ an instrumeiit named Bosola, a second but weaker 
Flamineo, who plays the outspoken misanthrope. The real excellence 
of the play is almost confined to the fourth act, where the unhappy 
duciiess is first imprisoned in a madhouse by her brothers, and then 
murdered. The fifth, at the end of which everybody kills oif everybody 
else — the husband, the brothers, and Bosola — is no improvement, 
and shows Webster's lack of dramatic tact. But he had a great 
though confused imagination, and a wonderful power of phrase. 

The work of John Day ^ is a good example of the " intricate 
impeach" of these plays and playwrights generally. His life would 
appear to have extended practically over the whole of the dramatic 
period (1580-1640), and from record it would seem that 
in five of these years only (i 598-1 603) he collaborated 
in twenty-one plays, of which only the odd one, the Blind Beggar 
of Bethnal Green, survives in accessible form. Besides these he 
wrote v/ith others and alone in later years, Law Tricks, the Travels 
of Three Brothers (the Shirleys), The Isle of Gulls, Humour out of 
Breath, and his most famous work, the Parlianieut of Bees. Most, 
if not all, of fhese seem to have been produced in a space not 
longer than that taken by the earlier and mostly unknown batch. 
They display, however, or most of them do, a certain character which 
is distinct from that of most of the plays of the period, and comes 
nearest to Lyly's — that is to say, the presentation in dramatic form 
of a series of scenes or tableaux embodying a more or less fan- 
tastic satire of the ethical kind, rather than a definite play-story. 
This is especially noticeable in the Parliat/ient of Bees, by which 
indeed, except to more or less thorough -going students. Day may be 
sufficiently known. For the last thirty years of his presumed life he 
appears to have written little or nothing ; and indeed he would seem 
altogether to have been one of those men who were rather hatched 
and coaxed into production by the prevailing heat and inspiration of 
the time than driven to it by necessity of their own talent. A gay 
and graceful spirit of fantastic allegory is his chief note. 

Nothing that is gay and little that is graceful appears in tjie two 
grim plays of Cyril Tourneur,- though allegory had hold on him also, 
as is seen in his non-dramatic piece, the Transformed Metamorphosis. 

i Ed. Bullen, privately printed, 1881. 

2 Ed. Churlon Collins, 2 vols. London, 1878. 



CHAP. II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 349 

The AtheisVs Tragedy and the Revenger''s Tragedy are the extremes 
of the kind of extravagant horror-mongering in drama which Marlowe 
ahiiost dragged to success in the Jew of Malta, and 
which Shakespeare tried and left in Tittis Aitdronicus. 
The Revenger''s Tragedy is by far the better of the two, having a 
glimmering of plot and some noble though austere sketches of 
character, with abundance of magnificent though gloomy poetry. 
The Atheist's Tragedy, with glimpses of the pathetic, and the strange 
bronze-medallion stamps of line here and there which these horror- 
mongers not seldom contrive to impress, is mere chaos and night- 
mare, beside which the Spanish Tragedy is an orderly attempt in 
serious drama, and the Insatiate Countess a well-arranged study of 
manners. 

From William Rowley, besides a very large amount of known or 
probable collaboration, we have two or three separate plays, such as A 
Ne%v Wonder and A Match at Midnight,^ which are very far from 
contemptible, and help us to mark off and appreciate his 
work with others. His special gift would appear to have owey. 
been the arrangement of that humours-and-manners comedy of con- 
temporary London which, as has been said, played such a large part in 
the dramatic works of the first half of the seventeenth century. Of 
this he must have had no small command, for though his comedy is 
rather rough, and his construction seldom soars above a kind of 
rough-and-ready stage-craft, he has humour and power of direct 
presentation. If any one will take one of his plays and a specimen 
from even the more commended writers of the next century, Mrs. 
Centlivre, Cibber, Mrs. Cowley, down to Foote and O'Keefe, he will 
begin to understand why the ordinary plays of the seventeenth 
century are ranked as literature, while those of the eighteenth are not. 

1 This will be found in Hazlitt's Dodsley. A separate edition of Rowley has 
long been expected from Mr. Bullen. 



CHAPTER III 

THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 

Drayton — -The Polyolbicn — Other poems — Daniel — Sylvester — Sir John Davies 
— Minor poets — Chapman — Fairfax — Campion — The Spenserians; minor 
poets — The Fletchers — Giles — Phineas — W. Browne — Wither — Basse — 
The lyrical impulse — Jonson's poems — Donne 

The division which has been here adopted, striking a line at the 
death of Spenser, and starting afresh from it, enables us in most 
respects to make cleaner work than if the death of Gloriana had been 
taken instead of that of Colin. We have behind us, and still freshly 
behind us, the remarkable school of the sonneteers — occasionally over- 
valued, but more often and more likely to be underestimated — the 
quaint batch of early satirists, a group artificial and transitory ; and 
the beginnings of the historical style of poetry. We have before us 
three well-marked schools : those of Spenser, Jonson, and Donne ; in 
two cases with the heads of them living and exercising personal 
influence, in the third with the leader dead but none the less living 
in his work. 

We have, however, two remarkable writers in the strictly poetical 
way to deal with — one of them hardly a dramatist (so far as extant 
work goes) or prose- writer, though a very voluminous poet ; the 
other the author both of prose and of plays, but a poet chiefly — 
who began to write some decade before Spenser's death. Of these, 
one lived till six years before the accession of Charles I., the other till 
six years after it. Both were sonneteers ; both were historical poets ; 
but both, with quite admirable touches of poetic genius now and then, 
and an almost too plentiful vein, lacked at once the initiative and 
the perfecting wit of Spenser. These were Michael Drayton and 
Samuel Daniel. 

All former accounts of Drayton's life have been antiquated by 
Mr. Oliver Elton's capital monograph for the Spenser Society,^ yet 

1 Privately printed. There is no complete edition of Drayton, but Chalmers 
has nearly the whole. 

350 



CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 351 

even now it cannot be said that we know very much about him. He 
came, like Shakespeare, from Warwickshire, and if not of gentle 
birth himself, was from the first attached in the honour- 
able fashion of service to gentle houses, and seems to "y'°"- 
have had some employment at court. His life nearly covered the 
fall seventy years, for he was born about 1563 and died in 163 1. 
He seems to have had no permanent connection with the stage,i 
but he fell early into the custom of sonneteeiing, his Idea (1594) 
being very probably addressed to the daughter of the house which 
protected him. The notices that we have give the notion of a man 
of masterful and not very obliging temper, who perhaps did not reach 
the rank or position which he thought his due, and was unwilling to 
be hail-fellow-well-met with mere pot-companions. Yet he seems to 
have been widely known, and to have excited, if no vehement friend- 
ships, yet no sharp dislike. 

His poetical production is extremely voluminous ; in fact, it is 
probably the largest that we have from any non-dramatic poet of real 
merit during the period. Its largest and most famous single item, 
the Polyolbion (1613-22) was not early — it could, in- 
deed, hardly be so, for the idea of compiling a poetical Poiyoitwu 
gazetteer of the whole of England would be vmlikely to 
occur to a very young poet, and could not possibly, in the dearth of 
books on the subject, have been carried out by any one who had not 
had many years to observe and amass materials. It has long been, 
and probably will ever hereafter be, little read ; but those who read 
it doubt whether to reprobate the choice of poetic form (the Alex- 
andrine with middle ceesura) for such a subject, or to admire the 
extraordinary resolution, resource, and, on the whole, success with 
which the work is carried out. It leaves, moreover, a considerable 
balance of work to Drayton's credit, a little of which is actually 
familiar to the choicer memories, while much deserves to be so. The 
sonnets, with the famous one — 

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part, 

which does not appear in all editions, and the authorship of which 
has been disputed; T/ie Shephenrs Garland (1593), which was also 
addressed to '-Idea," and in fact preceded the sonnets, as did the 

1 It was, however, busy while it lasted, during, as it seems, the last five years 
of the Queen, when Drayton was one of Henslowe's hacks, botching up, generally 
in collaboration, nearly a score of plays, almost all lost. William Longsivoi-d 
(price ^6, of which we have his receipt to Henslowe for forty shillings' advance) 
is the only one mentioned as his sote work. He had a fourth share in the pseudo- 
Shakespearian Sir John Oldcastlc, the only certain play-work of his which sur- 
vives. The attribution to him of the much better Merry Devil of Edmonton is 
only guess. 



352 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LrFERATURE hk. vi 



sacred poem of The Harmony of the Church (1591) ; Mortimeriados^ 
which he issued in two forms and under two names, once in 1596 with 
the title just given, and once in 1603 as Tlie Barons' 
Wars; and Eii^lamfs Heroical Epistles (1597), a batch 
of extremely vigorous historical pieces in miniature, — all came before 
the period at which, strictly speaking, we begin in this chapter. But 
Drayton did very much else besides these and the Polyolbioii, being 
evidently much attracted to history. He wrote two poems on Agin- 
court, the one a slightly heavy narrative of length in ottava rima, 
the other the famous ballad beginning — 

Fair stood the wind for France, 

the excellence of which in itself, and its importance as a pattern, have 
long been recognised. The Barons' Wars, the expanded form of the 
Mortiincriad, extends to six books. The Heroical Epistles deal in 
couplets with passages of English story that give romantic persons 
such as Fair Rosamond, Matilda FitzWater, Queen Isabel and Mor- 
timer, Queen Margaret and Suffolk, etc. etc., together with Surrey 
and Geraldine (a proof how Nash's fiction had taken hold) in pairs 
of epistles on the Ovidian model. The Miseries of Queen Mar- 
garet is an independent poem in octaves, and in the same metre 
Drayton executed four other historical legends on Robert Curthose, 
the above-mentioned Matilda, Gaveston, and Thomas Cromwell. Of 
a different kind are Nyi/iphidia, the most elaborate fairy poem in the 
language ; The Mooncalf an odd political and social satire in coup- 
lets ; The Owl, a long bird-fable ; and The Man in the Moon, a 
version of the Endymion story. Besides these Drayton has left a 
collection of odes in divers metres and some pastorals ; The Muses'' 
Elysium (this appeared in 1630, just before his death; he had col- 
lected many of the others in a volume three years before) in ten 
" Nymphals," and some odd versifyings of the stories of Noah, Moses, 
and David. He can be sometimes flat ; but few English poets have 
grappled with a larger number of important poetic subjects more 
vigorously and with happier touches at times. 

The shorter life of Samuel Daniel,^ who was born near Taunton, 
in 1562, was mainly passed as tutor, "servant," or friend and inmate 
of clivers noble families, the Cliffords, Wriothesleys, and Herberts. 
He received education at Oxford, and was Master of 
*""^' the Revels and Gentleman of the Chamber to James I., 
as well as groom thereof to his queen. His Delia and his Sen- 
ecan plays have been already noticed. Besides them he wrote in 

1 Poems in Chalmers; complete works in a very handsome edition by Dr, 
Grosart (5 vols, privately printed, 1885-96). 



CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 353 

prose the also noticed Defence of Rhy/Jie, and a considerable History 
of England (161 2-1 7). In verse he produced the History of the 
Civil Wars of York and Lancaster (i 595-1 609), in seven books of 
octaves ; a Funeral Poem in couplets on the Earl of Devonshire ; a 
Panegyric Congratulation to James ; verse-addresses to Lord Henry 
Howard, to the Countess of Cumberland, to the Countess of Bedford, 
to his pupil Lady Anne Clifford, afterwards a countess, to Lord South- 
ampton ; Mnsophilns, a verse-defence of learning ; some minor 
poems ; and The Complaint of Rosamond, in rhyme-royal, the best of 
his narrative work.^ Daniel is less unequal than Drayton, less given 
to merely prosaic statements of fact, and possessed of a command of 
high ethical reflection which inevitably reminds us of Wordsworth, 
and of hardly any one else. But he is apt to be dull ; his lyrical 
power, though shown to great advantage in the choruses of his plays, 
in his masque HyjneiCs Triumph, and elsewhere, does not often pass 
into vivid or inspired verse In other kinds, and he almost entirely 
lacks Drayton's occasional fire, as well as his almost continuous 
sinewincss — the faculty which enables the author of the Polyolbion to 
grapple with and give a fair account of almost any subject. Daniel's 
meditativeness is apt to pass into languor, and except when he trans- 
ports us, which is not very often, he is apt to send us to sleep. 

An almost exact contemporary of both Drayton and Daniel in 
point of birth, and of one of them in death-date, was Joshua Sylvester - 
(1 563-1618). Sylvester, though not exactly a successful man (he 
seems to have been engaged in business, and died 
secretary of a Company of Merchants at Middleburgh, in ^ ^.^^ '^^' 
Holland) was very popular in his own day. In the next generation 
or a little later he became a byword for '' conceit " and extrava- 
gance, and later again was totally forgotten. It is improbable that 
he will ever reacquire any considerable number of readers, for his 
genius was in no sense original ; he had neither the sententious weight 
and occasional grace of expression of Daniel, nor the vigour and 
frequent force of Drayton ; and his chief work, a version of the Divine 
Semaine of the great French Huguenot poet, Du Bartas, was un- 
luckily not suited to correct eccentricities of taste and extravagance of 
diction. Besides this mighty task, which extends to some thirty 
thousand verses in couplets, he translated other pieces from the same 
and other writers in French and Latin, and has left many thousand 
lines of more profuse and original work, usually in couplets or 
quatrains, but sometimes in lyrical metres. Of these last Sylvester 
has no effective control; he has neither "cry" nor song in him. 

1 He collected his poems repeatedly in his lifetime, and in 1623 the whole 
appeared. 

'^ Ed. Grosart, 2 vols, privately printed, 1880. 
2A 



354 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LTrERATURE bk. vi 

But he is not destitute of a certain kind of poetical or at least verse 
rhetoric, which, if it had been accompanied by a somewhat greater 
critical sense, might have ranked him higher among poets than he 
now stands. Such eminent oddities as the much-ridiculed one about 
snow " periwigging the woods " are not so fatal as the flatness which 
too often surrounds them. 

A very much better poet than Sylvester was Sir John Davies, ^ 
whose business as a lawyer caused him to abandon poetry in James's 
reign, but whose work, though all of it probably composed under, 

and some of it actually addressed to, Elizabeth, is of the 
JohnDavies seventeenth rather than the sixteenth century in tone. 

Davies was of a good family in Wiltshire, and was born 
about 1560, went first to Oxford and then to the Temple. He 
lived for some considerable time in his University, and seems to have 
written most of his poems there. But he entered Parliament in the 
last years of Elizabeth, was much favoured by James, and became 
Attorney-General in Ireland, writing during his long residence there 
one of the most valuable books of the time on the country. Then 
he returned home, practised at the Bar, and did a good deal of work 
on the Bench, though he was never regularly made a judge, and died 
in 1626. We have from him in the way of verse Nosce Teipsum 
(1599), a poem on the Immortality of the Soul, in quatrains, which 
connects itself backwards with much of the poetry of Spenser, and 
forwards with the philosophic verse of More and Beaumont ; a 
collection of acrostics in honour of Elizabeth, entitled Asircea (1599) ; 
and a poem of Dancing called Orchestra (1596). All three may, from 
their general description, sound uninteresting ; all three, in fact, show 
both the extraordinarily diffused poetic power of the time and the 
large sliare of it which had fallen to this author. Nosce Teipsum is 
full of passages finely thought and expressed in a stately music ; the 
liymns of Astrcea, the initials of each making " Elizabetha Regina," 
and arranged in five-five-six lined stanzas of octosyllables, full or 
catalectic rhymed, aabab, aabab, aabaab, have a grace which 
is beyond artifice, and manage their frequent doul^le rhymes 
witli singular skill. And lastly Orchestra, which is a whimsical 
praise of ordered movement of all kinds, with examples from history, 
cosmogony, anatomy, and everything else, is one of the crowning 
instances of Elizabethan power, by dint of sheer poetry, to transform 
fantastic conceit into matter of real value. Indeed, little known as 
Davies is, except to students, he is one of the most useful poets in 
English to show how very little the subject has to do with poetry. 

1 Poems in Chalmers; with additions in Grosart, 3 vols. Capell's remarkable 
Prolusions (1760), the first attempt to edit old English poetry critically in the 
eighteenth century, contains Xosce Teipsum. 



CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 355 

Another Sir John, Beaumont/ the elder brother of Fletcher's 
partner, died not long after Davies, but was a much younger man, 
as he was born in 1582. He was, like his brother, a 
member of Broadgates Hall and of the Inns of Court, 
but seems to have lived chiefly at home in Leicestershire. His 
title of baronet was given to him by Charles L only two years before 
his death in 1628. His principal work, The Crown of Tliorns, 
a sacred piece well spoken of by contemporaries, seems to be 
strangely lost ; his actual remains consist of Bosworth Field, a 
history poem, in couplets, not of the first merit, some translations 
from the Latin, and a few smaller poems on which his fame ought to 
be allowed to rest. They are mainly of a sacred character, with 
some topographical pieces, complimentary addresses, and the like. 
We can but name here for the second time the voluminous pam- 
phleteer in verse as well as in prose, Nicholas Breton 2; for the first 
the writing-master John Davies of Hereford,^ who sometimes has 
wit; Samuel Rowlands,^ who very seldom has any; and the so-called 
"Water Poet," John Taylor,^ 1580-1659, a waterman, publican, and 
pedestrian, who composed a vast quantity of doggerel, became in his 
own time and since a " curiosity of literature," and has had the very 
undeserved honour, denied to better men, of full reprint in our own 
times. 

Superior to Taylor by far in birth, education, and talents, yet, 
with one single exception in the whole of his voluminous work, 
like him merely a curiosity of literature, is Richard Braithwaite, who 
has shared the partiality of antiquarian students for the miscellanists 
of this age.® He was a Westmoreland man, born near Kendal 
about 1588, and seems to have died quite late in the latter half of 
the century (1665? 1677?) ^t his wife's house of Catterick, near the 
Yorkshire Richmond. He was a good Cavalier. In Braithwaite's 
voluminous work, which, if completely edited, would probably extend 
beyond Taylor's or even Breton's, there is no sense of criticism. The 
rare good, the frequent bad, and the usual indilTerent, jostle each other 
without any apparent discrimination on the part of their author. He, 
like others of his time, was a member of both Universities, beginning 
at Oriel and moving thence to Cambridge. But he seems to have 
passed most of his life in his own north country. His journeys 

1 In Chalmers. 2 Ed. Grosart. 3 /^/(/. 

4 Partially printed for the Percy Society, more fully for the Hunterian Club. 

5 By the Spenser Society. 

6 As examples (they are not the only ones) of this may be mentioned the 
edition of Bai-nabec's 'Journal, given by Haslewood in 1820, and reissued by 
Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in 1876, with a very elaborate memoir and bibliography; and 
that of the Strappado for the Devil, and other poems by the Rev. J. W. Ebsworth, 
in 1978. 



356 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE hk. vi 

thither from sojourns in London form the subject of the odd and 
(from Southey downwards to all good persons) delightful Barnabce 
Jtinerarium or Barnabee's Join'iial, in bilingual doggerel, Latin and 
English, arranged in six-lined stanzas of the trochaic rhythm, which 
revive the true doggerel spirit of Skelton with a really marvellous 
felicity. The morals are rather doggerel, too, but they can be taken 
dramatically. 

Chapman's work, as a poet and translator, seems to belong cliieHy 
to the middle period of his life. He began to publish his Homer 
(seven books of the Iliad) in 1598, and issued the Oeiyssey in 
1616. Before the first date he had published his earliest poems, 
the Shadoiv of Night, Ovid's Banquet of Sense, and the continuation 
of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, while the rest of them were scattered 
over his last thirty years. 

The original poems of Chapman — the two first above mentioned, 
the Tears of Peace addressed to Prince Henry, An Epicede on the 
death of that Prince, Andromeda Liberata (an either very awkward 
or very shameless adjustment of the story to the divorce 
Ch.ipman. ^^ Frances Howard, the murderess of Overbury, from 
Essex, and her marriage to Somerset), Eugenia (an epicede on 
Lord Russell), and some others — are by common consent among 
the obscurest in English. His metre is by no means so harsh as 
that of some of his contemporaries ; but his phrase is often extremely 
rugged, and his expression, especially in the Shadow of Night and 
Andromeda, is twisted, carried on, reinvolved, and subjected to every 
kind of unnatural manipulation, so that the sense is never easy to 
follow without extreme and constant effort, and sometimes escapes 
even this. Beauties are by no means lacking — on the contrary, it 
would not be easy to open a page of Chapman in search of a motto 
without finding some striking, though quaintly-put, conceit, or even 
some distinctly poetical expression. But lucid and finished combina- 
tion of thought and expression within reasonable limits is almost 
everywhere to seek. 

In his translations, on the contrary, these objections hardly apply 
at all. Besides the Iliad, and Odyssey, he did the minor works 
attributed to Homer, Hesiod, and some Juvenal. But these latter 
pieces are not equal to the Odyssey ; and the Odyssey, which is in 
couplets, is not nearly equal to the Iliad, done in a splendid swinging 
fourteener, better able than any other English metre to cope with the 
body as well as with the rhythm of the Greek Hexameter, and 
managed with extraordinary skill and success by the writer. For 
nearly a century it has been usual to quote Keats's sonnet as a 
sponsor for Chapman. The connection is interesting, but Chapman 
does not in the least require it. His translation remains, in tho first 



CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN TOETRY 357 

place, the only really good one of Homer into English verse ; in the 
second place, the best translation into English verse of any classic, 
ancient or modern, except FitzGerald's Omar Kliayyain. 

This position would by some be challenged for the work of 
Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso, whose birth-year is unknown, 
but who died in 1635. He was an offshoot of the great Yorkshire 
family of his name, and spent his whole life in that 
county, troubled by witchcraft (see Scott's De//iojiology), 
on which he wrote a Discourse (1621) deserving to be associated with 
the great demonological work of the period, Reginald Scot's Dis- 
covery^ though on the other side. His version of the Jerusalem 
appeared in 1600. It was, and long continued to be, extremely 
popular, receiving praise in the most diverse quarters from Waller to 
Collins, and while, from its subject and style, it was dear to students 
of romance, being credited with smoother versification than the 
Augustan ages would allow to most work of the "last age." It is 
a book 1 still to be read with pleasure, but, unless its praises be taken 
warily, with a little disapijointnient. Its style is rather flaccid; the 
very stamp of line which commended it to Waller impresses a touch 
of prose ; and Fairfax seldom has either the mazy beauty of Spenser's 
music or the panoramic power of his painting. 

Thomas Campion,'-^ whose name not so many years ago would 
have conveyed to but few readers any distinct idea of poetic 
.quality, was born at an unknown date, and though he was certainly 
a member both of Cambridge and the Inns of Court, 
frequented both in unknown times and circumstances. 
Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign he was a popular physician in 
London, and connected in friendship and enmity with divers men of 
letters. He was buried at St. Dunstan's, Fleet Street, on ist March 
1620. He wrote, and wrote well, in Latin as well as in English, 
but his importance for English literature is of a double character, 
and the halves are curiously opposed to each other. We have from 
him, in the first place, besides some masques, certain collections of 
verses for music,^ which contain much of the most exquisite rhymed 
poetry of the time ; and, in the second place, a formal treatise * 
intended to show, by precept and example, that English poetry ought 
to be unrliymed, and arranged on ancient quantitative models. It is 
not fair, though it has sometimes been done, to regard Camj^ion as an 

1 1 use the edition of I^'Estrange, London, 1682. 

2 Complete works, ed. Bullen (London, 1889). Songs to be found in the same 
editor's Lyrics from FJizabcthan Soiig-Dooks, two series (London, 1887-88), and in 
Mr. Arber's English Garner. 

^ Book of Airs, 1601 ; Two Books of Airs (1612?); Third and Fourth Books 
of Airs (1617 ?). 

^ Observations on the Art of English Foesy, 1602. 



358 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk, vi 



apostle of the preposterous hexameters, etc., which deluded Harvey, 
and all but seduced Spenser. He had seen the unsuitableness of 
these to English (which as he acutely observed is rebel to dactyls) ; 
and though he made some Sapphics, his own attempts are chiefly in 
very cunningly balanced iambic and trochaic unrhymed measures, 
some of which — such as the most often quoted, 

Rose-cheeked Laura, come — 

are at least the equals, if not the superiors, of Collins's " Ode to Even- 
ing " in this unnatural kind of abstinence from the greatest charm of 
English verse. In his "airs," on the other hand, he allows him.self 
the full liberty of our poetical Sion, and with the very happiest 
results, literally dozens of his lyrics being among the most delightful 
of their kind. In fact, the difficulty is to find in the Four Books of 
Airs anything that is bad. 

All these, however, with the exception of Sir John Davies, who 
might, with justice, be classed in tone, though not in language, with 
the Spenserians, lie outside the three schools which have been 
referred to above, and which make Jacobean poetry so extremely 
interesting both in itself and as a transition to Caroline. Of these 
we may take the Spenserian first, both as in origin the oldest and 
as lacking a living head and master. 

The class contains some outsiders, anonymous and named, who 
come closest to Spenser on that side at which he himself touches 
the luxuriant style of such pieces as Shakespeare's first poems. 
„,, '• Sage and serious " as Spenser undoubtedly was, there 

Spenserians: is also no doubt that both his Italian originals and his 
minor poets. ^^^ temper inclined him to the highly coloured pictures 
of natural loveliness which are abundant in tlie Faerie Queeiie. One 
of the very best poems of this class, BriiaiiCs Ida, a piece describing 
the loves of Venus and Anchises (" Britain's," because the legendary 
Brutus was son of Aeneas), used to be printed among Spenser's own 
vvorks,^ though it did not appear till long after his death (1628), and 
is quite destitute of the allegorical and ethical purpose which always 
accompanied his most luscious imaginings. It has more recently, 
though not on any evidence or with much probabilit)% been handed 
over to a disciple of his, Phineas Fletcher, of whom more presently. 
But it is best to take it as the work of an uncertain, though a very 
ingenious and agreeable poet. The Salmacis and HerinapJiroditus of 
Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, the Myrrha of Barkstead, and 
some other pieces belong to the same school. 

The general characteristics of Spenser, however, his allegorical 

1 It will be found in the useful one-volume Spenser, first published by Moxon 
and then l)y Routledge; also in the Aldine. 



CHAi'. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 359 

fancy on the one hand, and his ethical-pastoral tendencies on the 
other, with a certain copious and fluent diction which he introduced 
into poetry, are best represented by a group of Jacobean poets, two of 
them Cambridge men, two of the older university, who may be 
mentioned in the order in which they diverge from their pattern, 
Giles and Phineas Fletcher, William Browne of Tavistock, and 
George Wither. 

The two first ^ belonged to the family already noticed, and 
were sons of the author of Licia. Giles, who, though he is said to 
have been slightly the younger, died first, was first known as a poet, 
and is usually mentioned before his brother, was probably ^^ 

i he Fletchers 

born about 1585-88. But it is not certain that he was not 
older than Phineas, and even probable that he was, since he produced 
a poem on Elizabeth's death as early as 1603 at Cambridge, where 
he was a member of Trinity College. He took orders, and died 
vicar of Alderton, in Suffolk, in 1623. Phineas, who was educated 
at Eton, and proceeded thence to King's College, Cambridge, is said 
to have been born in 1582. He followed his brother's and father's 
profession, and was for very many years parson of Hilgay, in Suffolk, 
where he died at an uncertain date, perhaps not much before the 
Restoration. 

Giles takes his place in English poetry in virtue of a poem, not 
of the longest, entitled Chi'isfs Victory and Triumph^ in four books 
and some 250 stanzas of curious construction, and obviously modelled 
on the Faerie Qiiecne. Fletcher has kept the Alexandrine 
termination, but left out one of the lines, so that the 
result is an octave of seven decasyllables, and an Alexandrine rhymed 
ababbccc. The device is not in itself very happy, and in particular 
the triplet at the end comes awkwardly. But Giles has written it 
with such a glow and fire of continuous inspiration, with such 
splendour of language and imagery, and occasionally (indeed very 
frequently) with single lines and passages of such force and beauty, 
that few poems of the kind by any but the very greatest mastei^s can 
be read with equal pleasure. The picture and speech of Justice in 
the first canto with the contrasted portrait of Mercy ; the description, 
in the warmest Spenserian style, and with a really exquisite insertion 
of octosyllables ("Love is the blossom where there blows"), of the 
temptress Pangloretta in the second ; the overture of the third, which 
deals with the Crucifixion ; and almost the whole of the fourth, with its 
glowing descant on Paradise, rank among the triumphs of the ornate 
and fanciful kind of poetry in English. The Pre-Raphaelite effect of 
the poem is striking. It constantly reminds us, with allowance for 

1 Poems of both in Chalmers, and privately printed by Dr. Grosart. Christ's 
Victory, ed. Brooke, London, >/.d. 



36o LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE BK. VI 

the difference of centuries, of tlie work of the Rossettis, brother and 
sister, in its combination of vivid and elaborate pictorial effect with 
gorgeous word-music. Nor is the thought inferior to the expression. 

The work of the longer-lived Phineas is very much more volumi- 
nous, and very much more various — qualities which perhaps inevitably 
comport greater inequality. It is not easy to say that this poet was 
actually less pervaded with poetic spirit than his brother. 
He was, however, certainly less well inspired in the 
choice of his principal subject. The Pii}-ple Island, which is neither 
more nor less than an excessively elaborate allegory — unwisely 
magnified from one or two, not in themselves happiest, sketches of 
Spenser's — of the physical body of man. As a vehicle for this he 
arranged a still further modified stanza, which retained his brother's 
final triplet with its concluding Alexandrine, but cut off the last line 
of the quintet, so as to make a septet of quatrain-and-triplet effect 
willi three -rhymes. Individually, the stanza is even less successful 
than Giles's, while the poem has the additional disadvantages of a 
very awkward subject, and of much greater length (there are twelve 
cantos). The first half is mere physiology, and of course, though 
sometimes extremely ingenious, constantly grotesque, sometimes 
nearly disgusting, and deserving, at the best, the praise of an ill- 
judged tour de force. The last six cantos, which shift to the moral 
and intellectual qualities, are much more Spenserian and much 
hai)iner. But even in the earlier part an abundance of really fine 
passages may be discovered, and in overtures, episodes, and other 
ornaments of his song, the author shows, perhaps his sense that 
ornaments were sorely wanted, but certainly his skill in supplying 
them. Besides T/ie Purple Island, Phineas wrote a masque, 
Piscatory Eclogues, in which the following of Spenser blends with 
that of Sannazar, a curious sacred poem called The Apollyonists, 
well known, as indeed were all the poems of both the Fletchers, to 
Milton, and some miscellaneous pieces of divers kinds. Quarles called 
him the " Spenser of his age " ; and though the compliment was 
rather commonplace and slightly ambiguous, there was truth in it. 

William Browne,^ whose literary merits have been rather variously 
judged, was born at Tavistock, sometime about 1591, and seems to 
have been of a very respectable family. He went to Exeter College, 
Oxford, but took no degree before passing to the Inns 
W.Browne, ^f (^^^^j.^ (Qifford's Inn and the Temple) in 161 1. He 
was twice married, his first wife dying when he was very young, and 
a considerable time (some fifteen years) passing before he married 
the second. Before the latter date he returned to Exeter as tutor to 

1 Poems not completely in Chalmers. Completely in two volumes of the 
" Muses Library," ed. Goodwin, London, 1894. 



CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN PCJETRY 361 

a young nobleman, and somewhat late took the degree of M.A. 
After his second marriage he lived in Surrey, where both he and his 
wife had relations. He was dead in November 1645, when probate 
was granted to his widow, who had the odd name of Timothy, short 
no doubt for Timothea. But some say that his age, like his youth, was 
passed in Devon, and he pretty certainly was buried at his birthplace. 

The claim wliich was recently made of the exquisite epitaph, 
•• Sidney's Sister," for Browne seems without a sufficient external 
foundation, and is entirely refuted by internal evidence. But his 
reputation did not need it. His chief work is Britannia's Pastorals, a 
desultory book in three divisions, which appeared (its first part at 
least) in 1613 ; The ShephenVs Pipe, a pleasing collection of 
eclogues ; and The Inner Temple Masque, on the story of Circe and 
Ulysses, which opens with some verses of quite extraordinary beauty, 
the well-known '• Steer hither, steer," and includes others not far 
inferior to them. Besides these, he has a fair number of miscellaneous 
poems, thoroughly justifying the adjective — being serious, sacred, 
jocular, elegiac, and almost everything. Browne's extreme variety 
is conditioned by a corresponding inequality, and he is undoubtedly 
liable to a certain fluent prettiness, which lacks dignity, and some- 
times approaches too near to the namby-pamby. This touch of 
mawkishness, as well as better things, helps to bring about the 
singular likeness between Browne and Keats, which has been noticed 
by most good critics. And among the better things must be noted 
a great similarity in versification, the lines, whether couplets or other, 
being broken up and " enjambed," after the fashion which, after nearly 
two centuries, Leigh Hunt revived and taught to Keats ; while the 
way of looking at nature, and the ornate presentation of it — a 
presentation less stately than that of the Fletchers, but almost equally 
pictorial — give another point of contact. Browne is not nearly so 
great or so good a poet as Keats ; he had the disadvantage of coming 
after, not in the full tide of, the poetic energy of his time. But he 
has a large share of the special charm of this Spenserian group, its 
combination of habitual ornateness with occasional simplicity, its 
beauty of image and phrase, its love of nature, if of a nature " tricked 
and frounced " a little, its sensuous yet in no sense impure passion, 
and its occasional bursts of rare and elsewhere unheard music. 

The inequality, which is almost inseparable from the methods of 
this school of poetry, is again more perceptible in George Wither^ 

1 Only to be found completely (if there) in the private reprints of the Spenser 
Society. His best things, Philarcte, The Shepherd's Hunting, etc., are in Mr. 
Arber's English Garner. Not much of his Hymns of the Church and Hallelujah, 
reprinted by Mr. E. Farr in the " Library of Old Authors" (London, 1856 and 
1857), is of his best ; and most of his later verse and prose is rubbish. 



362 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE uk. vi 

than in Browne ; while unfortunately Wither, unlike Browne, continued 

to write verse for many years after the faculty of writing had left 

him. He was born near Alresford, in Hampshire, in the 

Wither 

year 1588, and was educated (but did not take his 
degree) at Magdalen College, Oxford. Then he entered an Inn of 
Court, and hung about London. His first book, the satirical Abuses 
Stript and ]Vliipt (161 3) procured him, nobody has ever discovered 
why, imprisonment in the Marshalsea. His famous " Shall I, wasting 
in despair" is said to date from this sojourn, and from the next decade 
till 1623 come all, or almost all, his really good poems — The 
ShcphcnVs Huniiiig (1615), Fidelia (1615), Motto (1618), Philareie 
(1622), and the Hymns and Songs of the Church. At the time of the 
publication of the Hymns he was exactly thirty-five. He lived 
to be nearly eighty, dying in 1667 ; and he constantly tried to 
" recapture his first, fine, careless rapture," but entirely failed except 
perhaps in some of the passages of his Hallelujah (1641). As his 
writing became worse and worse, and as in his later life, and during the 
parliamentary troubles, he became a Roundhead, his name (generally 
spelt Wither^-) was used as a sort of byword of contempt by the partisans 
of monarchy after the Restoration, from Dryden downwards, and the 
contempt was echoed from generation to generation afterwards by 
persons who probably had never read a line of his. Only when the 
work of the early seventeenth century was uneartiied for serious 
reading at the end of the last and the beginning of this, was it dis- 
covered what an exquisite poet had been for some hundred and fifty 
years classed with Bavius and Codrus. Yet it must be admitted 
that in his very best work, which is to be found in Philarete, though 
Fidelia and T/ie Shephcrd''s Hunting run this close, he is unequal. 
The easy, fluent, Keatsian note of verse and of nature-painting which 
is observable in Browne is even better found in him ; indeed, if 
genuine pastoral sweetness — the sense of the country and of country 
joys — is anywhere in English poetry, it is in Wither, who has much 
besides. But the very word fluency suggests the dangers which this 
verse coasts, and into which it sometimes falls. 

An addition to the poets of this school was made a few years ago 
by the printing for the first time of the works of William Basse,* who 
had been previously known, if at all, by some often-quoted lines 
about Shakespeare and Beaumont. Basse seems to 
have lived almost all his life in Oxfordshire as an 
honourable dependant of the families of Wenman of Tliame and 
Norreys of Rycote. He may have been, though we do not know that 
he was, a member of the University, as well as an inhabitant of the 

1 Ed. R. W. Bond, London, 1893. 



THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN P(JETRY 



shire. His initials, "W. B.," have led to some confusion with Browne, 
whose friend he was, to whose Pastorals he wrote commendatory verses, 
and whom he a good deal resembles in his own poems of the same kind, 
his Urania, his Polyhymnia (only surviving in fragments), and other 
pieces. But he is only a curiosity, and a very weak poet, though it 
may be a little stronger than any other outsider of the Browne7Wlther 
group, Christopher Brooke, whose poems have also been printed. 

The Spenserians, however, though their work was to be continued 
even later in the great, or at least large, philosophical poems of More 
and Joseph Beaumont, and though we shall find a more profane echo 
of them in the most interesting Pharonnida of Chamber- 
layne, were in fact behind their time, and did not represent ''^nipul"e^' 
anything like its characteristic tastes and impulses. These 
were to be found in two schools, or perhaps in one with two very 
different heads, who were Ben Jonson and John Donne. Both 
these men (we speak in this place, of course, of Jonson's non-dramatic 
work only) had an essentially lyric genius. It may seem strange 
that this should have co-existed with the rhetorical and declamatory 
tendencies of Jonson, and his bent to rough horseplay ; with the 
satiric tastes, in singularly rough verse, of Donne, and his gift of 
grave, stately, and involved prose-writing. But we have already 
seen that the whole inspiration of the Elizabethan age proper tended 
towards the lyrical — especially if sonnets be included in lyric. And 
as the Euphuist tendency in phrasing, and the ever-growing thought- 
fulness, inclining to melancholy in cast, of the later Elizabethan and 
Jacobean time disposed men ever more and more to conceit, lyric 
was also more and more the pet form in which they clothed their 
thoughts. Although the criticism of the time was not inclined 
openly to admit it, men of sense must have been more or less dimly 
conscious that a conceit in twelve cantos like The Pnrple Island, even 
in several pages of enigmatic couplets like The Shadoio of Night, was 
somehow overparted. In a few stanzas of exquisitely tuned Ivrical 
verse it to this day wins favour from all but the sternest judges ; it 
could not then fail to delight even the the sternest. 

Ben Jonson's strictly poetical production was continued over the 
greater part of his literary life, and perhaps most of it dates from the 
time when he ruled as dictator over his band of "sons," the poets of 
his own latest day and the next age. He attempted, out 
of drama, nothing large ; his plays at this time and his "^poems.^ 
masques at that probably sufficed him, and, as has been 
pointed out in the last chapter, the masques, with The Sad Shepherd, are 
treasure-houses of poetry — dramatic only in a remote and unconnected 
fashion, and constantly delightful. But his actual poems are of 
sufficiently various kind. Few good words have been bestowed upon, 



364 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LTFERATURE bk. vi 

and perhaps even fewer are deserved by, his epigrams, in which 
unluckily he set a fashion followed by others, especially Herrick, 
who did worse than their master. Martial's foulness without his 
wit, and too often without the least share of his ''concinnity" of 
style ; the extravagant tone and temper of a section of the playwrights 
and satirists of the last days of Elizabeth ; and worst of all, an 
affected surliness and rude hectoring dogmatism which it pleased 
Jonson to assume, and for which posterity has too often justly 
punished him by taking it as genuine — these are the chief character- 
istics of the epigrams. The bad habit of ticket names — Lord Ignorant, 
Sir Voluptuous Beast, Doctor Empiric — which disfigures the plays, is 
even more obvious here. If we read any with satisfaction, it is those 
in which the author takes a wholly different tone, as in the excellent 
one to " Camden, most reverend head," in the charming epitaph on 
his first daughter, and tlie exquisite flattery of Lucy, Countess of 
Bedford, in the dirges on Salathiel Pavy and Elizabeth L. H. 
And these excepted poems at once show us in Jonson certain 
characteristics, which are much more generally noticeable in the far 
finer and more equal collections called The Forest and Underwoods. 
The piece with which The Forest opens ^ is perhaps as indicative as 
any other of the manner and the example which Jonson was to set 
to his contemporaries and followers. For centuries English had been 
striving, often blindly, to achieve the peculiar clearness, proportion, 
completeness of expression which are characteristic of the two 
classical languages. It had succeeded in other things as great 
as this, perhaps greater, but in this it had not succeeded. Now 
it did succeed. The thought in the verses quoted is only a conceit, 
and though a perennially natural one, yet for that reason not even new. 
But it is expressed perfectly, neither with the redundant ornament 
and imagery of the school we have just left, nor with the obscure, 
though precious flickers, the carbuncle-glimmer in darkness, of that 
to which we shall shortly come. The wording and phrasing are 
classical, rather of the late than of the early classics perhaps, but still 
classical, with nothing extravagant in their richness, nothing starched 
or prim in their grace. 

The quality of grace has often been denied to Jonson, but of a 
surety wrongly. The pieces referred to above in the epigrams, this, 
the " Celia" songs, including the famous paraphrase from Philostratu.s, 
" Drink to me only," the magnificent cpode " Not to know vice at all 
and keep true state," very much of tlie Charis collection, written 
when the poet was fully fifty, the song " Oh do not wanton with those 
eyes," the elegy in the /;/ Afeinoriam stanza, and many others, dis- 

1 Entitled " Why I write not of Love," and beginning " Some act of Love 
bound to rehearse." 



CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 365 

play grace in the very strictest sense, and the list might be largely 
extended. Jonson is by no means the only poet who has thus united 
masculine and feminine characteristics, — indeed, the union is rather the 
rule than the exception in poetry, — but he is certainly an instance 
of it. 

The influence of John Donne ^ was even more potent, though it 
is extremely difficult to understand the precise manner in which it 
was exercised. This very great and very puzzling poet was born in 
London about the year 1573, and was connected on his 
mother's side with the Heywoods and Sir Thomas More. 
He appears to have been a member of both Universities and of 
Lincoln's Inn. It is not certain whether he was actually a Roman 
Catholic at anytime, but his family were of that faith. He travelled 
and served abroad, and perhaps spent his fortune in so doing. On 
returning to England he became a member of the household of the 
Chancellor, Sir Thomas Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere, and 
having made a clandestine marriage with Anne More, a relation of 
the family, was sent to the Tower, but soon enlarged. He took up 
his abode with more than one other gentleman, and did some diplo- 
matic work. At last, in 161 5, when he must have been over forty, 
he took orders at the King's suggestion, but at first without any very 
lucrative result. His wife died in 1617. After some more diplo- 
matic work, he was made Dean of St. Paul's in 1621, and died ten 
years later in 1631. 

It seems on the whole improbable that any part of Donne's poems, ^ 
except a very small one (the Anatomy of the IVorlcf, a poem on 
Prince Henry, etc.), was ever printed before his death, and the earliest 
known edition of the larger part of them dates from 1633. On the 
other hand, it is perfectly certain that some of them must have been 
written nearly forty years earlier, and it is clear that many, if not 
most, were known to men of letters who cared about poetry during 
the whole of the last half of Donne's life and more. There is even 
probabihty, though not certainty, in the supposition that a fling of 
Drayton's (in a poem where he mentions almost every prominent 
poet among his contemporaries except Donne) at poems " which by 
transcription daintily must go Through private chambers," refers to 
Donne. At any rate, it is beyond controversy, from references in 
Jonson's Conversations, and from the poems written by Carew and 
others on Donne's death, as well as from internal evidence, that he 
was at least on a level with Spenser and Jonson himself as a master 
of Jacobean poetry, while in some ways his manner and matter 

1 Poems in Chalmers, vol. v. ; ed. Grosart, 2 vols, privately printed, 1873 ; 
ed. Chambers, 2 vols. London, 1896. 

2 An alleged early edition of the Satires cannot be traced. 



366 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE pk. vi 

are even more characteristic of tliat poetry and of its Caroline 
successors. 

The Spenserians had made conceit in a manner their own ; but as 
they had produced no poet who was at all equal in intellectual power to 
their master, they had mostly treated it from the outside, fantastically, 
though sometimes very happily, describing or dressing up no matter 
what subjects in a brocaded garb of gorgeous and (when they could 
manage it) harmonious phraseology. Jonson was setting beside this 
loose, florid romanticism a severer ideal of classical grace, and was 
perfecting lyric phrase ; but Jonson's imagination rarely soared into 
strange or distant regions, and in particular his love-poems, though 
sometimes warm, are never metaphysically passionate. Donne, on 
the other hand, seems to have been born to combine all elements of the 
Renaissance spirit — the haunting meditation on death, the passionate 
attention to love, the blend of classical and romantic form. And he 
added a peculiar mystical charm, the result of the taste for conceit 
spiritualised, refined, and made to transcend. This it is which we 
observe eminently in his later prose contemporary. Sir Thomas 
Browne, and which communicates their distinguishing peculiarity, 
though not by any means always their distinguishing charm, to his 
sons, the so-called metaphysical poets, many indeed of whom owe 
something of a divided allegiance to Jonson and himself, but who are 
generally nearer to him in spirit, to Jonson in form. ' 

The form of Donne is indeed the most puzzling thing about him. 
Some of its peculiarities are beyond all doubt due to the mere fact 
that he never printed most of his poems, and that of hardly any can 
we be sure that we have a definitive edition from his own hand. 
More pcrliaps should be charged to the certain fact that in his later 
life he repented much of the matter of his earlier poems, and the 
probability that he abstained with delibe;'ation from publishing them. 
But this will not account for the whole phenomenon ; and the rough- 
ness was undoubtedly to some extent deliberate. That Donne had 
any intention of attempting a new prosody there is not the least 
reason for believing. In his Satires, where the roughness is most 
perceptible, there can be no doubt that the imitation of Persius, 
which is so noticeable in all the Elizabethan and Jacobean satirists, 
accounts for a good deal. In his other poems, when they leave the 
satire, the mere metre is as a rule correct enough. It is only that 
the intensity and fulness of the thought does not lend itself to actually 
smooth expression, without more labour than the writer seems to have 
cared to expend upon it. 

This intensity and this fulness appear with no very great, though 
with some, difference of degree in the various divisions of Donne's 
work — the Songs and Sonnets, the Elegies, the Epithalamia, the 



M'. Ill 'I'lIE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 367 

Divine Poems, the Verse Letters, the Epicedes and Obsequies, the 
Progress of the Soul, the Anatomy of the IVorld, and the Satires. 
The last named are, in consequence of Pope's rather blundering 
patronage, the best known, but they are the least interesting part of 
Donne's work, displaying the conventionality and exaggerated in- 
dignation of the whole class to which they belong. The Elegies are 
most remarkable for the undisciplined exuberance of feeling to which 
Donne, outspoken as were many of the writers of his day, gave more 
unhesitating voice than almost any of them. The Verse Letters are 
full of autobiographic interest, and in some of the more elaborate 
pieces, the ''Storm" and "Calm," which rejoiced Ben Jonson, very 
remarkable exercises in elaboration. The Epicedes, Obsequies, etc., 
are notable examples of the special ability of the time in these things. 
77^1? Progress of the Soul, which seems early, is a singular poem, a 
cross between The Purple Island and The Shadozu of Night, deeply 
shot with Donne's own jseculiarities, but not exhibiting them in the 
most amiable and profitable form. We are thus left with the Songs 
and Sonnets, and the Anatomy of the World, whicli, though the latter, 
in its two "anniversaries," is certainly much later than most of tlie 
former, and serves to some extent as a pendant and palinode, yet 
complete each other in the most remarkable fashion. The Songs 
exhibit Donne's quintessenced, melancholy, passionate imagination 
as applied, chiefly in youth, to Love ; the Anniversaries, the same 
imagination as applied later to Death, the ostensible text being the 
untimely death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, but the real sul)ject 
being the riddle of the painful earth as embodied in the death of the 
body. The Songs are, of course, in different lyrical forms, and the 
Anniversaries are in couplets. But both agree in the unique clangour 
of their poetic sound, and in the extraordinary character of the 
thouglits which find utterance in verse, now exquisitely melodious, 
now complicated and contorted almost beyond ready comprehension 
in rhyme or sense, but never- really harsh, and always possessing, in 
actual presence or near suggestion, a poetical quality which no 
Englisli poet has ever surpassed. It is from these poems that the 
famous ei^ithet " metaphysical " (which Jonson not too happily, and 
with a great confusion between Donne and Cowley, applied to the 
wholt: school) is derived ; and as applied to* Donne it is not in- 
appropriate. For, behind every image, every ostensible thought of 
his, tliere are vistas md backgrounds of other thoughts dimly vanish- 
ing, with glimmers in them here and there, into the depths of the 
final enigmas of lifi; and soul. Passion and meditation, the two 
avenues into this region of doubt and dread, are tried by Donne in 
the two sections re.->pectively, and of each he has the key. Nor, as 
he walks in them with eager or solemn tread, are light and music 



368 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

wanting, the light the most unearthly that ever pla3-ed round a poet's 
Iiead, the music not the least heavenly that he ever cauglit and 
transmitted to his readers. If this language seem more highflown 
than is generally used in this book or than is appropriate to it, the 
excuse must be that every reader of Donne is either an adept or an 
outsider born, and that it is impossible for the former to speak in 
words understanded of the latter. 



CHAPTER IV 

■SECULAR 



i Jac obean] prose \—'; 



Bacon — His life — His writings — His style — His use of figures — His rhetorical 
quality — Jonson's prose — The Discoveries — Their essay-nature — Protean 
appearances of essay — Overbury's C/iarac/ers — The Character generally — 
Burton — The Anatomy — His "melancholy" — His style — Selden — The 
Authorised Version — Minors 

The central figure in prose of the entire Jacobean period is un- 
doubtedly Francis Bacon. ^ He holds this position a Httle in spite 
of himself; for it was his own opinion, apparently deliberate and 

persistent, that Enolish was an untrustworthy make- 

■ . . Bacon 

shift, likely to play tricks to any book written in it, and 
that the only secure medium for posterity was Latin. And he also 
holds it in spite of the fact that he had more than reached middle 
life at the date of the King's accession, and that his one contribution 
of unquestioned importance to English literature, as distinguished 
from English science and philosophy, was first published long before 
that time. For the really characteristic editions of the Essays — 
those which are not shorthand bundles of aphorisms, but works of 
prose art — date much later, and the whole complexion of Bacon's 
mind and of his matured style has the cast of Jacobean thought and 
manner. 

He was born in January 1561, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, 
Lord Keeper under Elizabeth, and of Anne Cooke, whose sister 
married Lord Burleigh. His elder brother, Anthony, a man of weak 
health, who died in middle life, having talents and 
knowing Montaigne, has been thought not unlikely to 
have suggested the Essay to his junior. Francis was sent first, at 
the age of twelve, to Trinity College, Cambridge, then, when he was 

1 The editions of Bacon, both complete and partial, are extremely numerous, 
those of the Essays, the work which here chiefly concerns us, especially so. Of 
these latter may be singled out the " Harmony" of the various issues by Mr. Arber 
in his Rcpri)its, and the excellent annotated library edition by the late Rev. S. H. 
Reynolds (Oxford, 1890). 

2B 369 



370 LATER ELIZAP. ETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE pk. vi 



fifteen, to Gray's Inn, and spent three 3ears, till 1579, at Paris in the 
suite of Sir Amyas Paulet. He was called to the Bar in 1582, and 
became a bencher of his Inn in 1586. Having his fortune to make, 
he had already entered Parliament as member for Melcombe Regis 
in 1584, sitting afterwards for Taunton and Middlesex. He had 
early been rather a favourite with the Queen, but he probably did 
not ingratiate himself further with her by elaborating arguments 
for toleration and comprehension in ecclesiastical matters, and in 
1593 he actually took the Opposition side in the House. He had 
become the friend of Essex, but the favourite, either owing to Bacon's 
want of courtiership or to secret opposition from Burleigh, who 
seems (or at least was thought by his nephew) to have been jealous 
of him, could not do much, though he gave Bacon a very valuable 
present of land. After Essex's disgrace. Bacon acted as counsel 
against him in each of the trials, for misconduct in Ireland and for 
rebellion. But this baseness, which, after much dust 'of argument, 
is now practically admitted, did him very little good, and it was not 
till after the accession of James that he received any solid proofs of 
royal favour. He was knighted, received a small pension, and in 
1607 became Solicitor-General. This post he held six years, and 
became Attorney-General in 1613, a privy councillor some years later, 
and in 161 7 Lord Keeper. Next year (all these latter preferments 
came to him from the favour of Buckingham) he obtained the still 
higher dignity of Chancellor and a peerage as Baron Verulam. He 
was afterwards created Viscount St. Albans, but was never, as he 
was once commonly, and still is sometimes, called, "Lord Bacon." 
He held tlie Chancellorship for more than three years, and then fell 
a victim to the jealousy of the Commons, the enmity of Sir Edv/ard 
Coke, the desertion of Buckingham^ and, it must be added, his own 
malpractices. He was accused, and practically pleaded guilty to the 
charge, of taking gifts from suitors, or at least allowing his servants 
to take them, and the Peers sentenced him to a fine of _jr4o,ooo, im- 
prisonment, and exile from court. The fine was remitted, and he was 
not long kept in prison, but his banishment was maintained, and he 
lived thenceforward chiefly at his seat of Gorhambury. He caught 
cold in March 1626 and died at Lord Arundel's house near High- 
gate. ; His character does not much concern us, but there is littie 
doubt that, though personally gdod-natured, he had in a rather eminent 
degree all the bad qualities of Renaissance politicians except de- 
bauchery, and perhaps vindictiveness. He was profuse and greedy, 
ostentatious and mean, a born intriguer and tuft-hunter, and though 
it is proba])ly a mistake to represent him as completely sympathising 
with the Machiavelian doctrine of the right of the brave, bold, and 
cunning man to attain his ends by any means, he had much too 



CHAiMV JACOBEAN PROSE— SECULAR 371 

strong a tinge of this doctrine. Nor can it be said that, except 
scientific enthusiasm and a certain patriotism, he displays many of 
the nobler sentiments. 

The other vexed question, of the precise nature and amount of 
his philosophical acquirements, concerns us, if possible, even less, 
and we have to deal with him only as a great English prose-writer. 
In this capacity he published, in 1597, his first small 
batch of very succinct Essays (a work increased by sue- '^ ^" '"^'" 
cessive instalments to fifty-eight of a much more elaborate character 
in 1625) ; the Advancement of Learning in 1605 ; and in the last 
years of his life, after his disgrace, the History of Henry F//., The 
New Atlantis^ and some Apop/it/iegnis, besides some other chiefly 
minor works. His philosophical and scientific treatises were almost 
all written in Latin, in which language he even published an en- 
larged edition of the Advancement under the title of De Auginentis 
Scientiaritm. 

It is at once true of Bacon that no man has a more distinct style 
than he has, and that no man's style is more characteristic of its 
age than his. It has, indeed, been attempted to show that he had 
more than one style ; but this does not come to much 
more than saying that he wrote on a considerable number ^ 

of different subjects, and that, like a reasonable man, he varied his 
expression to suit them. Always when he is most himself — in the 
Essays as well as in the Advancement of Learning, in the Henry 
Vn. as well as in any other English work — we come sooner or later 
on certain manners which are almost unmistakable, and which, 
though in part possessed in common with other men of the time, 
are in part quite i^iosjncr^c. All Jacobean authors, and Bacon 
among them, interlard their English with scraps of Latin, and con- 
stantly endeavour to play in their English context on the Latin uses 
of words. All aim first of all at what is called pregnancy, and attain 
that pregnancy by a free indulgence in conceit. Few, despite the 
stateliness which they aftect, have any objection to those "jests and 
clinches " which even Jonsou seems to have thought of as interfering 
with the " noble censoriousness " of Bacon himself. In all a certain 
desultoriness of detail, illustration, and the like — as if the writer had 
so full a mind and commonplace-book that he could not help empty- 
ing both almost at random — is combined with a pretty close faculty of 
argument, derived from the still prevailing familiarity with scholastic 
logic. 

But Bacon, in addition to these characteristics, which he shares 
with others, has plenty of his own. His sentences, indeed, do not 
aitain to that extraori Unary music which is seen in some of Brooke 
and Donne, which is no': wanting in Barton, which is the glory of 



372 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERAIUKE bk. vi 

Sir Thomas Browne, the saving grace of Milton's best prose, and the 
ahnost over-lavished and sometimes frittered away charm of Jeremy 
Taylor. He had begun, as we see in the earliest form of the Essays, 
with a very curt, stenographic, sharply antithetic form ; and though 
he suppled and relaxed this afterwards, he never quite attained the 
full, languorous grace of Donne or Browne. But he became gorgeous 
enough later, the glitter of his antithesis being saved from any tinsel 
or "snip-snap" effect by the fulness of his thought, and his main 
purport being by degrees set off with elaborate paraphernalia of 
ornament and imagery. In the successive versions of the Essays we 
see the almost skeleton forms of the earliest filling out, taking on 
trappings, acquiring flesh and colour and complexion in the later, 
while in some of the latest, the well-known ones on Building and on 
Gardens especially, tlie singular interest in all sorts of minute material 
facts which distinguishes him comes in with a curiously happy eflect. 
Both the pieces just mentioned are much more like description of 
scenery in the most elaborate romance than like ideal suggestions 
for practical carrying out, drawn up by a grave lawyer, statesman, 
and philosopher. 

No point in Bacon's literary manner is more characteristic, both 
of his age and of himself, than his tendency to figure. Such a 
sentence as this in the Advancement, "Nay, further, in general and 

in sum, certain it is that Veritas and Boiiitas differ but as 
^figure^s ^^^^ ^^'^ "^"^^ ^^^^ print ; for truth points goodness ; and they 

be but the clouds of error which descend in the storms 
of passions and perturbations." — would show itself to any person 
of experience as almost certainly written between 1580 and 1660 in 
the first place, while in the second it would at least suggest itself to 
such a person as being most probably Bacon's. Although all the 
world in his day was searching for tropes and comparisons and 
conceits, the minds of few were so fertile as his ; and it is not un- 
worthy notice that even the apparently bold, even startling, change of 
metaphor from the "seal" to the "cloud" is in reality a much more 
legitimate change than it seems. 

It will stand to reason that such a style is displayed to the best 
possible advantage by bold and richly-coloured surveys of science in 
general, like the Advancement, or by handlings of special points, 

like the Essays. Whether Bacon was really <• deep," 
"'quaHt°y""' either in knowledge or in thought, has been disputed ; 

but he was certainly one of the greatest rhetoricians, in 
the full and varied sense of rhetoric, that ever lived. His know- 
ledge, deep or not, was very wide, ever ready to his hand for pur- 
poses more often perhaps of divagation than of penetration. His 
command of phrase was extraordinary. No one knows better than 



CHAiMV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 373 

he either how to leave a single word to produce all its effect by 
using it in some slightly uncommon sense, and setting the wits at 
work to discern and adjust this ; or how to unfold all manner of 
applications and connotations, to open all inlets of side-view and 
perspective. That he dazzles, amuses, half-delusively suggests, stim- 
ulates, provokes, lures on, much more than he proves, edifies, 
instructs, satisfies, is indeed perfectly true. But the one class of per- 
formances is at least as suitable for literary exhibition as the other, 
and Bacon goes through tlie exhibition with a gusto and an effect 
which can hardly be too much admired. Fertile in debate as almost 
all his qualities have proved, there is at least one of them about 
which there can be little difference of opinion, and that is his in- 
tense literary faculty. It was entirely devoted to and displayed in 
prose — he wrote very little verse, and that little is nothing out of 
the way. But in prose rhetoric — in the use, that is to say, of lan- 
guage to dazzle and persuade, not to convince — he has few rivals and 
no superiors in English. His matter is sometimes not very great, 
and almost always seems better than it is, but this very fact is the 
greatest glory of his manner. 

In those characters of style which, not to the utter exclusion of 
chronological order, but with a certain prerogative right over it, 
determine the arrangement of literary history, three writers hold 
with Bacon in Jacobean prose the place which we have assigned to 
Donne, to Jonson, and to Spenser after his death in Jacobean verse. 
Of these Donne and Jonson again appear, a duplication of itself 
sufficient to prove the high and too long ignored position of these 
writers in English literature; the fourth is Robert Burton. But 
Donne, for sufficient reasons, will be kept to the next chapter. We 
shall deal with Jonson and with Burton here. 

The independence and the importance of Ben's position are 
shown, among other things, by the fact that, while in the general 
history of English prose he makes a distinct advance, he appears 
among the writers of his own time as isolated, as, indeed, 
almost reactionary. The gorgeousness of Jacobean phrase, 
the involution of Jacobean thought, the tricks of both which al- 
most approach the heraldic sin of "colour upon colour," do not 
appear in him ; he is of his time chiefly, if not only, by his learning 
and by the compression and pregnancy of his style, in which latter 
points he approaches and sometimes almost excels Bacon in his 
most serried and least ornate moments. Unfortunately, the amount 
of Jonson's prose that we have is by no means large, some having 
certainly, and much probably, perished (with verse as well) in a fire 
which destroyed the contents of his study. Besides prefaces, dedica- 
tions, and the like, we have only an English Gratn//iai', valuable, but 



374 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

of course not for points of style, and the invaluable collection of notes, 
short essays, and peiisccs which, never having been published in 
his lifetime, goes by the alternative titles of Sylva, Explorata, Timber, 
or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter — the most usual, and 
perhaps the best, appellation being simply Discoveries. 

These notes, 171 in number, each titled with a short Latin head- 
ing, and varying in length from three or four lines to the bulk 
of a good short essay, have much superficial and some real resem- 
blance to the work of Bacon, whose intimate and, as far 
Discoiu:ries. '^^ ^^ ^^^ i" ^'''^ nature, admiring friend Ben was. But a 
minuter examination shows that, except the compressed 
and pregnant tendency mentioned above, there are few points of real 
likeness, and that Ben belongs to an entirely different school from 
that of the Chancellor. The license of quip and jest is absent ; the 
coruscating metaphors, more brilliant perhaps than luminous, but 
brilliant enough, are absent likewise ; the volleying antithesis, though 
present, is more heavily shotted and less often blank cartridge ; the 
unusual, and intentionally unusual, employment of Latin or Latinised 
terms is less for ornament and more for use. In short, Ben Jonson, 
allowing for his age and circumstances, belongs to the plain, not 
the ornate, section of prose-writers ; he is at daggers drawn with 
Euphuism in the larger as well as in the smaller sense. Yet he does 
not revert to or imitate that kind of plainness which Ascham set in 
order, and which Hooker, by sheer genius for proportion and harmony, 
made more elegant than ornateness itself. He advances upon it ; 
we find in him distinct shadows before, echoes in anticipation of, the 
plain style as it was to be reformed by Dryden. and to continue till 
the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with sentences of moderate 
length, symmetrically balanced, deriving little appeal from abundance 
of antithetic adjectives, but with the antithesis promoting, not obscur- 
ing, character and directness. Not, of course, that Jonson wholly 
escapes the figurative passion of the time. When he speaks of man 
''making a little winter love in a dark corner," we hear the contem- 
porary and the friend of Shakespeare and Bacon. In such a sentence 
as "In being able to counsel others a man must be furnished with a 
universal store in himself to the knowledge of all Nature; that is the 
matter of seed-plot ; there are the seats of all argument and inven- 
tion," we have the mixed style ; the first half might have been 
written by the other Johnson, or by any eighteenth-century writer of 
the higher class ; the second brings us back to the fanciful and 
dreamy seventeenth. But often for whole sentences, and not very 
seldom for whole passages, the nervous, uncoloured, to some extent 
sterilised, fasliion of the prose of 1660- 1800 appears with hardly a 
tuucli of archaism about it. And wc must remember that Jonson's 



CHAP. IV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 375 

influence continued mighty for at least two generations after his 
death ; that it was very strong with Dryden himself, the literary 
prophet not merely of the second of these generations, but of the 
whole eighteenth century. 

Moreover, the matter of these Discoveries^ as well as the apho- 
ristic or axiomatic form of much of them, was such as was likely to 
impress in their style on the more thoughtful readers, those who 
were actual or possible writers themselves. They indeed 
illustrate (though they do not bear the name and contain essay^nature 
one direct gibe ^ at the form) the growing attraction and 
importance of the essay, which Bacon alone had as yet adopted by its 
own title, but which, as we shall see both in this chapter and in others, 
was, either under its own name or under others, gradually to absorb a 
greater and greater share of the attention of prose-writers and prose- 
readers. The farrago of the book is of the most miscellaneous 
character. Ethical remarks are; of course, numerous. — the seven- 
teenth century was nothing if not ethical, — -but they are found side by 
side with a body of discourses upon rhetoric, with valuable passages 
of criticism on individual writers, — Spenser. Shakespeare, Bacon, 
Montaigne, and of course the ancients, — with a remarkable tractate 
in little on education, and with notes on arts, politics, history. 
Indeed, Ben is the essayist whom he affects to slight, and his adoption 
of the plainer style may without too much fancifulness be taken as a 
sort of pointing of the vane in the direction almost of Addison, cer- 
tainly of Dryden. 

The temptation of the essay, though under another name, sliows ^ 
itself as strongly, and with not less literary influence, though with far 
less literary accomplishment, in the famous Characters of Sir Thomas 
Overbury."^ Their author was a man by no means Protean 
specially estimable or specially amiable, but recom- appearances 
mended in the first place by his performance in a kind "' ^^^^^' 
which was of growing popularity, in the second l^y his miserable end. 
He was born of a respectable family in Warwickshire in 1581, went 
to Queen's College, Oxford, in 1595, took his Bachelors degree, 
and passed to the Middle Temple. He travelled, and seems to 
have been a protegi of Robert Cecil, afterwards Lord Salisbury, but 
unluckily for himself became connected later with the favourite Carr, 
afterwards Earl of Somerset. He was knighted in 1608, and 

1 " Such {i.e. desultory and ill-digested] are all the essayists, even their master 
Montaigne." 

2 Works, ed. Rimbault (London, 1856). The late Mr. H. Morley published 
in the " Carisbrooke Library " a very interesting collection of Character- Writers of 
the Seventeenth Century, including Overbury, Earle, Butler, and much minor 
matter. 



376 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LLrERATURE bk. vi 



attained a very great reputation for ability. But lie set himself 
against his patron's marriage with Lady Frances Howard, the 
divorced Countess of Essex, one of the worst women of whom history 
gives record ; and having, as it seems, also contrived to offend Anne of 
Denmark, was sent in May 1613 to the Tower, nominally for refus- 
ing an ambassadorship. For about four months attempts, equally 
bungling and remorseless, were made to poison him, and after 
suffering horrible tortures from them he is said to have been finished 
by vitriol. The matter came to light some three years afterwards, and 
though the chief criminals, Carr and his wife, escaped with imprison- 
ment, divers under-strappers, including the Lieutenant of the Tower 
and Mrs. Anne Turner, famous for her yellow starched ruffs, were 
executed. Bacon conducting the prosecution. But a great deal re- 
mained unexplained, and suspicion, which has never been quite 
removed or at all confirmed, attached to the King's physician. Dr. 
(afterwards Sir) Theodore Mayerne, and to the King himself. 

This, however, is matter of history, not matter of literature, and it 
is only mentioned here because Overbury's singular promotion first, 
and his horrible and apparently mysterious fate afterwards, no doubt 
helped the reputation of his works. Yet intriguing, braggart, and 
insolent as he seems to have been, he must have had that art to 
divine the tendencies of the time which frec]uently belongs to men 
of the world. His Observations on the Low Countries (1609) is 
a fair ordinary State paper of the old-fashioned kind ; his Wife, a 
poem in sixains, seems to have acquired interest from the probably 
false notion that it was written to discourage Carr from marrying 
Lady Frances ; his Cricnibs fallen from King James'^s Table piu^port 
to be, and probably are, mere reports of the utterances of the wisest 
fool in Christendom. They are chiefly interesting because they con- 
tain the crude matter of Rochester's saying on the King's grandson : 
" Some men never speak a wise word, yet do wisely ; and some, on 
the other side, never do a wise deed and yet speak wisely." But he 
would now be entirely forgotten if it were not for his Characters. 

They were not — indeed, none of his works seem to have been — 
l^rinted during his lifetime, and from the first they bear ascription to 
" Sir Thomas Overbury and his friends^'' while in successive impres- 
sions from 1614 they were increased in number from 
CharacU'rs. tweuty-one to a hundred, including divers specimens of 
the old " News from this or that place " which had 
been common in the Elizabethan pamphlet. The most famous 
pieces that are at least probably Overbury's own are the "Milk 
Maid," constantly quoted in anthologies, tlie "Affectate Traveller," 
and the "Mere Fellow of a College." With the ' limitations to 
be observed of the Character generally, they are very closely 



JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 377 



connected with the pamphlet already noticed, and were continued 
throughout this reign and later. But they have some characteristics 
which, when we compare them with Earle and other followers (see next 
Book), seem likely to be Overbury's own — a sharp observation 
expressed with antithetical conceit, a hard, presumptuous, unamiable 
wit, and a general superciliousness which accounts in part for Over- 
bury's fate. 

The introduction of the Character, however, is a very important 
thing. It came, of course, from Theophrastus, and during the whole 
of the seventeenth century, in France as well as in England, indeed 
all over Europe, continued to be an exceedingly favourite ^^^^ 
form of the essay, which was in so many ways over- Character 
running literature. " Humours " in prose dc//es lettres s*^"^'^ y* 
as well as in drama were the fashion of the time, and the very staple 
and substance of the Character is a "humour" in the seventeenth- 
century sense. The advantage of the style was that it at least 
invited, and, as we shall see in Earle's case, successfully, to accurate 
study and artistic reproduction of its subject ; the disadvantage that 
it lent itself to hardening of types — An Amorist, A Braggadochio, A 
Pedant, and hundreds more — to dressing them up simply out of the 
writers own head, without any real induction from individuals, and 
also to certain conventionalities of expression. In Overbury partic- 
ularly the forcing of Euphuist imagery to enliven the phrase, and 
tlie abuse of antithesis to give it point and "snap," are unmistakable, 
and to readers not of the time excessively tedious. The only thing 
to be said is that these excesses in one direction or another are 
peculiar to no time, and that from each, bad as it is in itself, 
ingredients of universal style have been picked up. The antithetic 
and pointed character helped to crisp style, to save it from languor 
and complexity, as well as constantly to invite the writer to study 
from the life. 

More generally recognised than these, and perhaps equally 
significant to the general tendencies of the time, but with less direct 
influence on the form, though he had enormous influence on the 
matter, of English prose, is Robert Burton. We do not 
know as much of this author as might be expected, 
seeing that he was not of the elusive race of London Bohemians, but 
resident in a great University during almost the whole of his life, and 
that his work was at once, and with men of letters enduringly, popular. 
He was born in Leicestershire of a good family in 1577, and after 
education at the grammar schools of Nuneaton and Sutton Coldfield, 
went to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1593. After six years he was 
elected to a studentship at Christ Church, which he held till his death 
in 1641, as well as the livings of St. Thomas in the University town, 



y 



378 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 



and of Segrave in Leicestershire. He appears never to have resided 
out of Oxford after his entrance at Brasenose, so that he had some- 
thing like fift}'- years of uninterrupted study to provide him with the 
extraordinary learning that appears everywhere in his great and only 
work, The Anatomy of Melancholy^ first jDublished in 1621, and 
much altered and increased in successive editions during the last 
twenty years of his life. His death has sometimes been attributed 
to suicide, but on merely fanciful grounds, and without any direct 
evidence to that effect. 

The Anatomy of Melancholy has sometimes been thought to have 
been suggested by a book called TJie Anatomy of Humours^- written 
by one Simeon Grahame, and published at Edinburgh in 1609. 
Examination of this, however, shows absolutely no 
Anatomy, similarity of style, thought, or treatment, Grahame's 
book being in most respects similar to the Elizabethan 
pamphlet in a sort of rambling railing at actual or supposed vice and 
folly, with free quotation in verse and prose. The title may to a 
careless observer seem more suggestive, but the fact is that the term 
" anatomy " (as it needs no more than two such well-known examples 
as Lyly's Anatotny of W'it and Stubbes's Anatomy of Abuses to 
show) had been a bookmaker's catchword for more than a generation 
before Burton wrote. Indeed, there are very few books in literature 
more original than his, in that best sort of originality which, exhibit- 
ing certain general features of time and race, stamps these with an 
individual and unmistakable expression. 

The two features whicli are in a sense common to Burton and to 
all the men of his time are his learning and his melancholy. The 
former, in prose and verse, in matter ostensibly serious and matter 
ostensibly light, has been already sufficiently shown to be the Jacobean 
characteristic. It may be doubted whether any age since, and 
it is certain that no modern age before, has had so much solid 
reading ; for the range of mediaeval possibilities in this respect was very 
much narrower, and if modern reading has still further widened, the 
widening is, it may be suspected, more than made up by scrappiness 
and want of depth. " Democritus Junior," the notn de guerre which 
Burton chose, has, in the enormous and most carefully arranged 
treatise which he has devoted nominally to Melancholy and its cure, 
but really to the life and thouglit of man, amassed such an extraor- 
dinary amount of reading that probably no follower of his has ever 
tracked him completely through the maze of canonists, physicians, 
historians of the Middle Age and Early Renaissance, not to- mention 

1 Constantly reprintetl, but never thoroughly edited. There is no handsomer 
or better form than that of Sliillolo and Bullen (3 vols. London, 1893). 

2 Reprinted for theBannatyne Club (Edinburgh, 1830). 



CHAP. IV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 379 



almost the whole of the classics and a very considerable number of 
his own contemporaries. He shows his learning, not by mere refer- 
ences, though of these, both looser and exacter, he is singularly 
profuse, but by a unique tissue of actual citation, or paraphrase, or 
both combined, which he does not lay upon his own canvas in the 
ordinary fashion of quoting, but weaves and infuses into it in the 
strangest and subtlest manner. 

Nor is his " melancholy " itself much less a characteristic. 
There is no reason to believe that it was, despite Ben Jonson's 
excellent anticipatory raillery in Every Man in his Humour, affected, 
and even that raillery itself shows that it was a popular 
symptom, thought worthy of affectation by fools, in the choiy.^"^" 
wise men of the time. It is by no means wanting in 
Ben himself; it is the special mark of Donne, perhaps the most 
gifted man of letters next to Shakespeare whom we notice in this 
Book, and of Browne, the equal of the most gifted that we shall have 
to notice in the next. Even in Bacon, though kept back by liis 
sanguine philosophical hopes, his personal ambitions, and his touch of 
Philistinism, it is not far behind the foreground, and it is evident in 
his master, and the master of many others at this time — Montaigne. 
It was, in fact, the natural reaction following upon the high and 
fantastic hopes of the earlier Renaissance, and ushering in the 
prosaic and slightly vulgar limitation to low aims of the late seven- 
teenth and most of the eighteenth century. In Burton it shows 
itself not so much in the sense of the unattainable infinity of passion 
which we find in Donne, of the high feeling of mystery and altitiido 
that we find in Browne, as in a sort of quiet but intense taedium 
vitae — a wandering of the soul from Dan to Beersheba through all 
employments, desires, pleasures, and a finding them barren except for 
study, of which in turn the taedium is not altogether obscurely 
hinted. And it is almost unnecessary to add that in Burton, as in all 
the greatest men, except Milton, of the entire period from 1580 to 
1660, there is a very strong dash of humour — humour of a peculiar 
meditative sort, remote alike from grinning and from gnashing of 
teeth, though very slightly sardonic in its extreme quietness and 
apparent calm. 

With writers of this kind, and it may be added pretty generally 
of this time, it is difiicult to keep strictly to those considerations of 
form and expression which the history of literature proper demands, 
so subtle is the connection between their temper and its 

His style. 

utterance. But if it were possible to abstract Burton's 
merely formal characteristics, they would still be of the most interest- 
ing character. To accommodate the wide purpose, indicate the 
voluminous citation and allusion, and infuse the subtle spirit already 



38o LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

described might seem almost impossible, yet it is done with wonder- 
ful success and with such charm that those who have once acquired, 
or who naturally possess, the taste for Burton's style find enjoy-' 
ment in it almost greater than that given by any other writer except 
Sir Thomas Browne himself. Its sentences are frequently of a 
length daring even for that age ; and the clauses, largely consisting 
of the illustrative quotations or paraphrases above referred to, are 
strung together with a still more audacious looseness, the effect being 
not unfrequently that of a man thinking aloud without taking the 
trouble to insert the ordinary copulas and syntactical mortar. Yet 
Burton is never obscure, and when he has no need of a long sentence 
he can write a short one as nervous, as terse, as distinctly articulated 
as anything of Jonson's own. 

Like Burton, and even more than Burton, John Selden outlived 
the reign of James ; but his characteristics are rather Jacobean than 
Caroline, and his most noteworthy work was written well before the 
accession of Charles. He was born in 1584, the son of 
a Sussex yeoman, was educated at Chichester and Oxford, 
and became a .famous "black-letter lawyer" in the Temple. His 
political life did not begin till the next reign, and does not greatly con- 
cern us ; it is enough to say that he was one of those respectable but 
not very statesmanlike persons who undermined the royal authority 
till they saw it begin to totter, and then were aghast at the tottering 
and tried in vain to prop it up. In 1 614 he had published his famous 
treatise on Titles of Honour, and in 161 8 his History of Tithes — two 
works of extraordinary learning but somewhat cumbrous in style. 
He is now, except as a writer for reference, not reading, remembered 
almost entirely by his Table Talk^ collected by his secretary and 
published (1689) long after his death in 1654. This book not 
merely contains a great deal of practical tliough slightly Philistine 
wisdom, and a certain amount of sharp aphoristic wit, but also exhibits 
the same difference, when compared with Selden's published work, as 
that existing between the writings and the sayings of Johnson, to whom, 
indeed, though on the other side in political and ecclesiastical beliefs, 
Selden bore much resemblance. It is curious too to compare the 
book with Ben Jonson's Disco-veries and to see how in each the Essay- 
tendency displays itself, many of the sections in the Table Talk being, 
in fact, e.ssays in little. 

Selden was no literary critic, and his remarks on the Authorised 
Version of the Bible '(1611) show an extraordinary insensibility to the 
merits of that mighty book. That it is the greatest monument by far 
of Jacobean prose there can be very little doubt, and the objection 

1 Ed. S. H. Reynolds, O.xfoid, 1892. 



CHAP. IV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 381 

which Seidell himself made, and which has been rather unwisely 
echoed since, — that it does not directly represent the speech of its 
own or any time, — is entirely fallacious. No good prose 
style ever does represent, except in such forms as ife'd version" 
letter-writing and the dialogue in plays and novels, the 
spoken language of its time, but only a certain general literary form, 
coloured and shaped not too much by contemporary practice. The 
extraordinary merits of the Authorised Version are probably due to 
the fact that its authors, with almost more than merely human good 
sense of purpose and felicity of result, allowed the literary excellences 
of the texts from which they worked — Hebrew, Greek, and Latin — 
and those of the earlier versions into English from that called 
Wyclif's to the Bishop's Bible, to filter through their own sieve and 
acquire a moderate, but only a moderate, tincture of the filter itself 
in passing. No doubt the constant repetition, universal till recently 
and pretty general fortunately still, of the text in the ears of each 
generation has had much to do with its prerogative authority, and 
still more with the fact that it still hardly seems archaic. But the 
unanimous opinion of the best critics from generation to generation, 
and still more the utter shipwreck of the elaborately foolish attempt 
to revise it some years ago, are evidences of intrinsic goodness which 
will certainly be confirmed by every one who, with large knowledge 
of English at different periods, examines it impartially now. There 
is no better English anywhere than the English of the Bible, and one 
of its great merits as English is its retention of the " blend " character 
of all the truest English products. 

Certain minor writers of James's reign have at this time or that 
acquired admission to literary history, nor is it perhaps necessary to 
oust them. The chief historian of the reign, next to Knolles, was Sir 
John Hay ward, a lawyer, who was born in 1564 at Felix- 
stowe, went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, died two '^''"°''s- 
years after the accession of Charles, and wrote a History of the First 
Year of Henry IV., a History of Edward VI., and other historical 
and some theological work. Samuel Purchas (1577-1626) continued 
the work of Richard Hakluyt (1533-1616), the great collector and 
redactor of Elizabethan voyage and travel, as editor and populariser 
of geography with less, but still considerable, charm of writing ; and 
Sir Henry Wotton, the author of some famous and charming poems, 
was a good letter-writer and produced rather numerous but seldom 
singly important prose tractates on a wide variety of subjects. 



CHAPTER V 

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — I 

Great pulpit oratory necessarily late — Function of sermons, 1600-1800 — Andrewes 
— Ussher — Hall — Donne 

That the title of this chapter belongs of right to the seventeenth 
century nobody but a paradoxer is ever likely to dispute. Even the 
eighteenth, which exaggerated the tendency of almost every century 

to look down on its immediate predecessor, had not much 
*^'orato^'''' doubt about this. Nor will those who have followed 
necessarily the history here given of English literature, and especially 

of English prose, be surprised either that the particular 
development was so late or that it came when it did. In the first 
place, it is impossible that any, and especially that pulpit, oratory 
should be early, because it requires the previous development of a 
varied prose style. Moreover, the tradition of the Mediaeval and early 
Renaissance Church, which made vernacular preaching distinctly a 
concio ad vidimus, and encouraged the preacher to descend even to 
horseplay to make himself intelligible and popular, was not very 
favourable to the creation of a pulpit style at once flexible and 
dignified. The Reformation brought little improvement at first, for 
if the audience were learned it encouraged a mere tissue of scholastic 
and erudite citation and argimient, if it were unlearned there was an 
inducement to the rude and often blasphemous railing which disgraced 
both sides. Before Hooker there is hardly an English preacher 
whose work is of the first class as literature. We must go back to 
Latimer, and earlier still to Fisher, before we find any with such 
pretensions ; and Latimer is too homely, Fisher too formal, and both 
too archaic to have them admitted except by allowance. 

Hooker, however, who did so much for English, was too much 
occupied in writing, and during the greater part of his priesthood 
had too uneducated audiences, to leave many sermons ; and the great 
tradition of the English pulpit and of controversial and other English 
divinity of the best literary kind begins later. The amount of really 

382 



CHAP. V THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPri'— I 3S3 

noteworthy work of this kind composed for more than a century is 
enormous. During this century, and even during much of the next, 
sermons were extremely popular, and indeed discharged ^ 

■^ , '■ ^ t unction ol 

one part of the function of the modern newspaper, as sermons, 
the playhouse did others. They were also as a rule ^ °°~^ °°' 
much longer than modern discourses in England, and they were far 
more used for reading than they have been for nearly a century. In 
fact, it may almost be said that the printed sermon, for some two 
hundred years, represented the whole modern furnishings of the cir- 
culating library to most women who had either education or character, 
and a large part of it to many men, even men of the world. 

We must therefore, from the beginning, proceed by selection ; 
and it so happens that in this particular department selection is less 
injurious than in any other, at any time save the Middle Ages. The 
subject-matter of sermons, though admitting the widest individuality 
of particular handling, must always be within certain limits the same; 
and in hardly any kind of writing do famous and popular models 
tend to reproduce themselves so faithfully. From Hooker and 
Andrewes to Newman, the reader or hearer who knows the styles 
of the leaders knows those attempted, though no doubt often clumsily, 
by hundreds of followers, and except for special purposes he may 
therefore neglect these latter. In the present chapter we shall 
take as representatives Andrewes, Ussher, Hall, and Donne. The 
second division of the subject, to be taken up in the next Book, will 
be more populous. 

Lancelot Andrewes ^ was born at Barking in Essex in 1555, and 
was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Pembroke College, 
Cambridge, of which he became Master. He was from the first 
much patronised, and successively became prebendary , , 

Andrewes. 

of St. Paul's and Westminster, Dean of the last-named 
cathedral under Elizabeth, and Bishop of Chichester, Ely, and Win- 
chester under James. He was very prominent at the Hampton 
Court Conference and in the translation of the Bible, and though, 
like most prelates of the time, he perhaps dabbled more in court 
intrigues (especially in that bolgia of crime the divorce and re- 
marriage of Lady Frances Howard) than might be desired, he has 
never been justly judged a sycophant. He died in 1626. Of his 
learning and of the strange fervency and intense eloquence of his 
Priv'ate Devotions there have never been two opinions ; his Sermons 
have excited more dispute. The charge against him is said to have 

1 The standard edition of Andrewes is that in the Library of Ang1o-Catliolic 
Theology, Oxford, 1841-54. The Greek and Latin Devotions have been frequently 
translated and given separately, most recently by Dr. A. Whyte (Edinburgh, 
1896). 



384 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

been put early by "a Scotch nobleman," when the bishop preached in 
Holyrood Chapel. '• He rather plays with his subject than preaches 
on it." The criticism was by no means unfounded, though it would 
apply to nearly the whole of the preachers of Andrewes's time, except 
Hooker himself, in England. Perhaps it may be put better by 
saying that the sometimes far-fetched and romantic symbolism and 
imagery which in Donne among the earlier, in Taylor among the 
later, preachers of the school produce such miraculous effects, are 
in Andrewes crude and not finally transformed by art. No doubt 
his immense learning, in which he excelled almost every one of that 
learned time excejDt Ussher, aggravated the evil. 

James Usher (or rather Ussher) himself was more a writer than 
a preacher, the most erudite of an erudite time, and one of the most 
voluminous authors of a time when most authors were voluminous. 
But he cannot be omitted here, and he escapes the 
blame not quite unjustly passed upon Andrewes by never 
attempting flights or rhetoric at all. He did not wish his sermons 
to be published, though they were ; his great chronological and 
historical works, which gained him a practically enduring fame, 
are mainly in Latin. In English he wrote chiefly on Celtic Antiquities, 
especially those of an ecclesiastical complexion, as well as on the 
burning questions of the time — the Protestant-Papist controversy, 
divine right, and the like. His style, like that of so many men of 
his time, is largely conditioned by his method of argument, which 
consists, though by no means wholly yet very mainly, in appeals to 
authority and citations from the inexhaustible store of his vast 
reading. Only the idiosyncrasy of a Burton can infuse writing of this 
kind with any particular tincture of style. But Ussher is always 
plain and clear. Neither his temper nor his immediate purpose 
inclined him to any superfluity of ornament, and when he gets free 
from citation and has a paragraph or two to write, as the common 
phrase is, "out of his own head," he rather exemplifies the Ascham- 
Hooker tradition than the more conceited manner of his own day. 
He was born in Dublin in 1581, and was nephew of Stanyhurst, the 
eccentric translator of Virgil. He was one of the first alumni of 
Trinity College, Dublin, became Fellow, and gave himself up to 
stud}', becoming Professor of Divinity in his University in 1607, 
Bishop of Meath in 1620, and Bishop of Armagh in 1625. When 
Ireland became convulsed by the Rebellion, he went to England, 
and was for some time preacher at Lincoln's Inn. Though a steady 
Royalist, he was not molested by the Parliament or by Cromwell, and 
died quietly at Reigate in 1656. 

With Bishop Hall ^ we get into a higher sphere of literary 
1 Works, ed. Wynter, 10 vols. O.xford, 1863. 



CHAP. V THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — I 3S5 

accomplishment. His verse was entirely of the previous or strictly 
Elizabethan period, while his prose was entirely of this or the 
next. This early verse was purely secular ; but the sue- 
ceeding prose was by no means purely theological, 
though its most noteworthy division of the secular kind, the 
Cliaraders of Virtues and Vices, seems to have been composed 
(1608) with a view to use in sermons. These Characters precede 
Overbury's in point of time, and though they never became so 
popular, excel them in simplicity, being often quite as pointed, and 
as a rule not nearly so contorted and fantastic. Hall's subsequent 
writings during his long, busy, and (till the evil days of rebel- 
lion) prosperous life, were extremely multifarious — sermons, medita- 
tions, autobiographical pieces, controversial tracts (such as those, 
for instance, which brought upon him Milton's clumsy invective), 
expository matter. In his sermons and casuistical work he par- 
ticularly affects a plain but energetic style of attack on the 
consciences and hearts of his hearers ; and this element of direct- 
ness is also generally prominent in his politico-ecclesia.stical polemic. 
In his meditations he is more ilowery and figurative, as is reasonable 
enough. But at no time can he be said to share to the full the 
tendencies of his age in this particular direction, being too much of 
a fighter when he is not a mere meditative moralist. Perhaps also 
he may exemplify the rule to which his enemy Milton is one of the 
not many exceptions, and the great writer whom we are shortly to 
mention another, that those who write both poetry and prose usually 
write the latter with some restraint, while the very ornate or fantastic 
prose writers are chiefly those who cannot express themselves in 
verse. 

This, however, as has just been hinted, is by no means the case 
with our last and greatest exemplar. Few are more of a piece in 
poetry and prose than Donne,^ and much of what has been said of 
his verse will apply equally to his prose. This consists of a 

11 ,T,rr^ -1 Donne. 

large body — some two hundred — of Sermons, a consider- 
able number of Letters, a short and curious tractate to prove that 
in certain circumstances suicide may not be a sin, some Essays in 
Divinity, some Devotions, and a few miscellaneous treatises. All his 
work, however, even in prose, whatsoever it be called, essay, sermon, 
letter, or what not, is again strikingly like itself and strikingly unlike 
anything else, being, like the verse, saturated and pervaded by 
Donne's peculiar melancholy. The expression of this seems to be as 
easy for him in prose as in verse, or, to speak more justly and accu- 

1 Ed. Alford, 6 vols. 1859. Unfortunately not at all a good edition and 
not complete. Dr. Jessopp's little edition of the Essays can sometimes be 
picked up. 

2C 



386 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi 

rately, he succeeds in elaborating a prose stjle just as suitable for it 
as is his style in verse. He is clearer in prose than in verse except 
(curiously enough) in his Letters, which often display almost as much 
metaphysical conceit as the most recondite passages of his poetry. 
But he has the three great characteristics of Jacobean writing — the 
learning, the profundity, and the fantastic imagination. And the 
profundity is here not merely real, but of a depth rarely surpassed in 
English, while the fantastic imagination becomes something more 
than merely fantastic. The "kingship" which Carew ascribed to 
Donne is at least as noticeable in his prose as in his verse, and 
thougli the realm over which lie rules is rather a Kingdom of Night 
than of Day, a place of strangely lit gloom rather than of mere sun- 
light, it is a kingdom of wonderful richness and variety. It may be 
questioned whether Donne's very best passages are exceeded, even 
whether they are equalled, by any English prose-writer in the com- 
bination of fulness and rarity of meaning with exquisite perfection of 
sound and charm of style. In these latter points he is at least the 
equal of Jeremy Taylor at his best, and though Jeremy Taylor is no 
shallow thinker, his thought is a mere pool to the oceanic depth and 
breadth of Donne's. There is a certain quality of magnificence, too, 
in Donne beside which the best things of Taylor are apt to suggest 
the merely pretty. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Donne knew 
when to let a great thing alone ; and few of them, for instance, would 
have been content to let such a phrase as the likening of the coming 
of God to the soul " as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as 
the sheaves in harvest to fill all penuries," without frittering away 
its massive and complete effect into subdivisions and added epithets, 
into appendices and fringes of thought and expression. 

Moreover he, as Hooker in his very different style had had be- 
fore him, but as hardly any one else, had the sense of the paragraph 
— of the crescendo and diminuendo of cadence required to wind it 
safely and melodiously from start to finish. His sentences are 
sometimes too long, they are too often made to do the work of 
the paragraph itself; but this is often more a matter of punctuation 
than of real structural arrangement. And whether they be called 
sentences or be called paragraphs, there lingers round each of them 
the glimmer of an unearthly light and the notes of a more than 
earthly music. 



INTERCHAPTER VI 

It has been frequently pointed out that the connection of the present 
Book with the last and next is of a kind which will not be repeated, 
and which has not been earlier found between the successive divisions 
of this work. All three are wholly busied with what is usually and 
rightly, from one point of view, called Elizabethan Literature. All 
thi-ee are mainly busied with the productions of a not extraordinarily 
long lifetime — 1580 to 1660; while such a lifetime as that of 
Fontenelle would have taken a man from Wyatt's days almost to the 
publication of the Hesperides, from that of EupJmes to the death 
of Milton, or from the birth of Shakespeare to the Restoration. Yet 
the separation into three, besides avoiding cumbrousness and con- 
fusion of arrangement in other ways, enables us to bring out the 
three divisions of rise, of culmination, and if not exactly of decadence, 
yet of a long and gorgeous sunset, in a very satisfactory fashion. 

There can be no real difficulty in according to our present stage 
the title of culmination. We have indeed lost two or three, but 
only two or three, of the very greatest names of the whole period. 
To the reign of James (though no thanks to James himself) belong 
the greatest work of Shakespeare, almost the whole work of Bacon, 
the great bulk of the more accomplished work of the minor drama- 
tists, a volume of exquisite non-dramatic poetry, and a body of most 
interesting, if still partly inorganic, prose. 

It is no doubt in the department of pure poetry that the period, 
partly by accident, partly not, contrasts least favourably both with its 
predecessor and its successor. That Spenser is dead at its begin- 
ning, and Milton a boy at its close, is itself not wholly accidental. 
For Spenser, though he could have added to the volume of our 
delight, would probably have given us something new in kind, had the 
Irish rebels allowed him to reach his seventy years in peace ; and 
Milton would not have been quite Milton without the Jacobean 
period itself behind him. We have seen what the character of that 
period was in poetry, and how Spenser's own influence, with Donne's 
and Jonson's, was at work in it, shaping and preparing the forces, 

387 



388 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. 

accumulating the matter, which were to result on the one side in the 
massive structure of Milton, and on the other in the exquisite filagree 
of the Caroline lyrists. But we can here better perceive in the work 
of the three themselves, as in that of their followers, the special 
Jacobean profundity, its weight of thought, and its slight consequent 
weariness. The "bloomy flush" of the Elizabethan period proper 
has fled ; the conceit remains, but it is graver, less childlike ; the 
play of words continues, but it is changing into the play of thought, 
sometimes hardly to be called play, so laborious and Cyclopean is it. 

It follows that the actual poetry of the reign, that which e.xclu- 
sively or especially belongs to it, is somewhat less charming than that 
of the poets who owe more direct allegiance to Elizabeth or to Charles. 
Yet the best of the songs of the dramatists date from this time ; the 
masques of Ben Jonson and others contain, in the good old phrase, 
" poetry enough for anytliing " ; we cannot find out of Spenser and 
Rossetti more gorgeous things than the best passages of the Fletchers ; 
anywhere perhaps sweeter things than the best trifles of Ben, of John 
Fletcher, of Wither, of Browne ; anywhere at all such mysterious 
melody as that of Donne. Yet, since we find most of those who are 
thus gifted dating back from Elizabeth or persevering to Charles, we 
may be justified in reserving for the middle stage, here as elsewhere, 
the special qualities of weight and thought. 

There can be no doubt at all that this place is the proper one 
for its prose. As we have seen. Euphuism in the large sense, 
ornateness, gorgeousness, horror of the obvious, has altogether the 
upper hand as compared with succinctness, directness, appeal only 
to power of matter and proportion of arrangement. Yet Ben Jonson 
relies very mainly on these last, and no one, not even Bacon, succeeds 
in manipulating the dictionary like an organ after the fashion of the 
great Caroline writers, unless indeed it be Donne, to whom here as 
elsewhere the universal monarchy of wit is subject. But the prose 
of James's reign, putting aside the half-accidental magnificence of 
the Authorised Version, must rest its claims on the fkntastic and 
splendid, but not fully organised, form of Bacon and Burton, on the 
weighty and sterling matter of both these and of Jonson. 

In neither case had a perfection of style been reached. The 
author of the Essays and the author of the Anatomy have discarded 
the more childish things of Euphuism ; but they have not quite 
attained the full perfecting of its best things that Browne and Taylor 
were to show. Ben Jonson has recoiled from this same Euphuism 
(always using tlie term as a sign and symbol rather than as a limited 
designation), and has sometimes achieved a plain style almost perfect 
in its way. But he had been busied with otlier things, and was 
perhaps not equipped with sufficient versatility to make a prose 



VI INTERCIIAPTER VI 389 

writer absolutely of the first class. The others, except Donne, who 
did but transprose his verse and trans-hallow his profanities, are 
minors. 

Yet in both directions the period, especially for so brief a one, 
did more than its fair share in the mere furthering of style, in doing 
its stage on that circular but always interesting journey. And in 
point of kind as distinguished from style that establishment of the 
Essay, in more forms than one, which we have seen was a matter of 
the vei"y greatest importance, that development of the sermon which 
we have also seen, a thing of importance hardly lesser. The opjisclc 
as opposed to the opus magnum was thus, in matters sacred and in 
matters profane, promoted to distinct literary rank ; and in each case 
literature was carried from the study into other apartments of the 
house, if not even into the street. 

But undoubtedly the very greatest accomplishment of the time 
was its accomplishment in drama. After making every reasonable 
allowance for the obscurity which rests on so many of the exact dates 
of the Elizabethan theatre, we can be fairly certain that the larger 
number of its consummate examples date from the first quarter of the 
seventeenth century — most of the best work of Shakespeare, all, with 
one exception at each end, of the best work of Jonson, all the work 
of Beaumont, of Fletcher, and probably most of the best work of all 
the rest save Shirley, belong to it. Moreover, in what follows there 
is little or nothing new. The effects which have been achieved with 
such gigantic expenditure of genius, if not exactly of criticism, first 
by the Jniversity Wits and Shakespeare in his initial period, then 
by Shakespeare and his great contemporaries in this special time, 
are merely repeated, weakened, and at last frittered away. It would 
hardly be rash to say that of the really great plays included in the 
general list of the Elizabethan drama, not merely four out of five or 
nine out of ten, but nineteen out of twenty belong to this time. Yet 
we need, in this special place of summary, say less of it than we have 
said of the Elizabethans proper, and still less than we must say when, 
after the next Book, we sum up the whole great epoch of which it 
forms a part. For the centre of any period partakes necessarily 
more of the characters of the two ends than they do of it. In so far 
as the Jacobean age deserves a description of qualities to itself, that 
description must be what has been more than once given. Depth 
and weight appear in it as they appear in none other ; yet does it 
not lack finish and arace. 



BOOK VII 



CAROLINE LITERATURE 
CHAPTER I 

BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 

The central period of English prosody — Distribution of Caroline poetry — Milton 
— His life — The earlier poems — Coiiiiis — The blank verse — Lycidas — Son- 
nets — The longer poems — Their blank verse — Their matter — Milton's place 
in English prosody — Cowley — His couplets — The lyrics — The Pindarics — 
Denham — Waller — The " reform of our numbers " 

We have traced the gradual growth of prosody, which is tlie 
distinguishing feature of poetry, steadily onwards from the first 
appearance of English as a blend of Teutonic, Romance, and other 
elements ; and we have seen how, after the strange and 
not yet accounted for changes in the fifteenth century, perfodo7 
a fresh start was made about the middle of the third English 
quarter of the sixteenth. After this, for some fifty years, '°''° ^' 
almost every style of poetry was tried. But one style — not of poetry 
proper but of the mixed kind called drama — had more effect than all 
the others put together, by adjusting metre to the exigencies, not of 
mere recitative, not of formal music, but of spoken language in every 
relation and circumstance of life, comic and tragic, impassioned and 
ordinary. This great period in drama was in 1625 nearing its close, 
but its work was already done. And while, on the one hand, the pecul- 
iar influence of Jacobean tliought and style in general, and of the three 
great poets in particular, resulted in a continuance of poetry differ- 
entiated from the Elizabethan only by an increased tendency to the 
metaphysical in tone and the lyrical in form, the dramatic current 
mixing with that of general poetry produced two things which were 
practically new — the use of blank verse for non-dramatic purposes in 

391 



392 CAROLINE LIT^:RATURE book vii 

original poetry, and the altered form of the couplet, which between 
them, gradually ousting in great part lyrics and the stanza, were to 
dominate English verse for nearly a century and a half. 

We can hardly do better than treat the poetry of the period 
under these two heads, but we shall have to deal with them differ- 
ently. The poets who are mainly distinguished for their work in 
D-t ib ti n ^^'^'^^ verse or couplet, with Milton at their head, show 
of Caroline such differences from their immediate successors, headed 
poetry. ^^ Dryden, that, save as far as Milton is himself con- 
cerned, we shall have ceased dealing with them at the accession of 
the second Charles. But, with some special and striking changes of 
tone, the poets, partly " metaphysical " in subject and mainly lyrical in 
form, persevere long beyond that date, and even, with Sedley and a 
few others, beyond Charles the Second's death and into the ne.xt 
century. We shall, therefore, in this and the next chapter, cover un- 
equal spaces of ground ; but the chronological inequality will be 
more than compensated by the logical exactitude which will be 
obtained, even though some of those with whom we shall deal belong 
in a manner to both divi.sions. Milton is at once an exquisite, 
though too little copious, poet of the school of Jonson and of Spenser 
(never quite of Donne) and an innovator in pure poetry who has 
none but dramatic masters. Cowley never entirely knows whether 
he is a metaphysical Pindaric, or a lyrist, or a common-sense 
coupleteer. Chamberlayne, to take still a different class, writes ex- 
clusively (or almost so) in couplets, but his couplets are not in the 
least of the new kind. We shall class them all according to the 
division to which each, either in the bulk of his work or in its main 
tone and temper, belongs, always noting when they cross the boun- 
dary line. But keeping the boundary itself will enable us, in a 
manner which could not be so well otherwise done without endless 
confusion and repetition, proviso and warning, to indicate the falling 
line and the mounting in English poetry during the last three-quarters 
of the seventeenth century. 

John Milton,^ who though his position as the greatest or not the 
greatest of English non-dramatic poets is open to question, occupies 
unquestionably the greatest place among such poets as an influence 
and model, was a Londoner by birth, and was born in 
Bread Street on 9th December 1608; but his family 
belonged to Oxfordshire. His father, a money-scrivener (a profession 
now extinct, or rather absorbed, but then a cross between banking and 
law), resembled his son in combining Puritan sympathies in religion 
with strong literary and artistic tastes. The only other member of 

1 Editions innumerable, but the larpier (3 vols. London, 1890) and smaller 
(" Globe ") of Professor Masson stand before all others. 



CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 393 

the family who is remembered was the poet's younger brother 
Christopher, afterwards Sir Christopher, who became a judge and 
was a very strong Royahst. Milton entered St. PauPs 
School in 1620, and went thence five years later to 
Christ's College, Cambridge, where his personal beauty and cor- 
rect moral character were observed, but where his insubordinate 
and unaccommodating temper seems to have got him into trouble 
with the authorities. He was once rusticated, but took his degrees 
in due time, becoming M.A. in 1632, at the end of the usual seven 
years. His father had bought a property at Horton in Buckingham- 
shire, and there Milton remained in unmolested and unprofessional 
study for six years, during which he produced most (some is even 
earlier) of his early verse, and displayed, as some think, nearly his 
highest poetical genius, if not his full poetical power. The indulgence 
of his father next allowed him a tour abroad, and leaving England at 
the beginning of 1638, he spent the great part of two years chiefly 
in Italy. When he came home he settled in Aldersgate Street, and, 
having the full Renaissance interest in education, acted as school- 
master or tutor to his nephews and others. 

During the twenty years of civil commotion he wrote, except a 
few sonnets, no poetry, but was fertile in controversial prose, which 
will be dealt with in another chapter. He married in 1643; the un- 
lucky bride's name was Mary Powell, of a good Cavalier family in 
Oxfordshire, with which Milton had been long intimate ; but the 
marriage was extremely ill-assorted, and in a few weeks his wife left 
him and went to her parents. This desertion Milton construed into 
a reason for divorce, and argued this point out in several tracts, which 
naturally caused a good deal of scandal. She retunied in 1645 ^^^ 
died in 1652, leaving him three daughters, whose relations with him 
were not more happy than their mother's. Rleanwhile his tract- 
writing, now devoted to purely political matters, and especially the 
defence of the execution of the King, procured him the post, under 
the Commonwealth, of Secretary of Foreign Tongues, that is to say, 
for diplomatic correspondence in Latin. He lost his eyesight in the 
same year in which his first wife died, and married a second in 1656, 
but she, the "late espoused saint " of his sonnet, died also in 1658. At 
the Restoration he hid himself, but was not molested, and settled near 
Bunhill Fields. He married a third time in 1663, this time more 
successfully in comfort and permanence. The publication of his 
great epic (see below) followed at no great interval, and he died on 
November 1674, and was buried at St. Giles's, Cripplegate. 

Milton's character was not amiable, and its harshness was no 
doubt accentuated, both in life and letters, by his singular want of 
humour ; but it only concerns us in so far as it affects his writings. 



394 ■ CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

These, as has been seen, fall under three unusually well-marked 
periods : the first including all the early poems up to Lycidas ; the 

second fertile in prose, but yielding no poetry exxept 
poems.'"^'^ most of the Sonnets ; the third giving the two Paradises 

and Sat/isoji Agonistes. We must say something about 
each of these periods and its results before endeavouring to touch 
briefly the whole question of Milton's place as a poet. His precocity 
has sometimes been admired, but this doubtful gift was not in any 
very great measure his. The few poems which we have dating 
earlier than his coming of age are scarcely better than a very large 
quantity of minor verse. The first unmistakable signs were shown 
by the great Ode on tJie Nativity (1629). About this there can be 
no doubt whatever, except in the minds of those who so dislike what 
is called fiorid poetry that they are blinded by the flowers. Both 
in the stanza-prelude, and still more when the actually lyric part 
begins, the note to ears that can hear is as new as it is exquisite. 
Even Spenser had not written like it ; even Spenser had not written 
anything" more individual and more delightful in word-music ; while, 
if we compare it with what had been done or could be done by the 
best poets then alive, — Drayton, Chapman, Jonson, Donne, Wither, 
the Fletchers, etc., — we shall find a note of witchery which only 
Donne could have surpassed, while the soft harmony of the motion 
is altogether different from Donne's less mellifluous touch. The 
Ode on the Nativity, as the herald's cry of a new great poet, is a test 
of the reader's power to appreciate poetry. It is perhaps sufficient 
proof of Dr. Johnson's initial disabilities as a critic of seventeenth- 
century verse tliat he does not so much as mention it. For the 
famous pair, V Allegro and // Penseroso, no one has ever had any- 
thing but praise, though some have hinted that " Penseroso " is not 
very choice Italian. Even Dr. Johnson could feel their universal 
charm, nor is there much need of commenting on what is matter of 
universal knowledge and universal consent. But it is worth while to 
note that even at this early time Milton displayed his wonderful 
science of versification in the handling of the octosyllable, catalectic 
and full, and also his complete command of whatever expression he 
needs. He has little of the conceit of his contemporaries, but he has 
almost more than their average learning, and yet he manages to 
treat it as lightly as possible. These same characteristics are notice 
able in the few other short pieces which we have from this time, 
especially the exquisite fragments of the Arcades. But before the 
poet took leave of the muses for a less delightful mistress, he was to 
produce two substantive poems, Conttis and Lycidas, either of which, 
but especially the former, would have settled the question of his place 
in poetry, j Comjis was written in 1634 as a masque to be presented 



CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 395 

(with music by Lawes) at Ludlow Castle before, and by the cliildren 
of, Lord Bridgewater, President of Wales ; Lycidas not till just before 
Milton's departure for Italy, and nominally to celebrate the death of 
Edward King, a Cambridge contemporary and friend. The last is 
deeply tinged with the coming blackness of political and ecclesiastical 
faction ; the first is almost free from it, though not quite so free as 
L" Allegro and // Fenseroso. But both are of the very first order of 
poetry. 

Co»ms (not so called by Milton), though avowedly a masque, 
lies between that kind and the lyrical dramas of Jonson and Fletcher, 
of whom Milton was a diligent student. The scenery and decora- 
tions are of much less account in it than in the masque 
proper, and the story, though not very elaborate, is more 
solidly and substantively dramatic. The argument, suggested partly 
by the Odyssey, partly by Peele's Old Wives'' Tale, is extremely 
simple. Two brothers and their sister, wandering in a wood 
haunted by Comus, Circe's son and imitator, part from her in 
search of a guide and shelter. She falls, bewitched by art but pro- 
tected by her virtue from any real harm, into the enchanter's power, 
till he is driven off by her brothers and an attendant spirit (half 
Mentor and half Ariel), and the charm is reversed by Sabrina, the 
river-nymph of the Severn. But on this slight and little " incidented" 
theme, while treating even the characters symbolically and typically 
rather than as individuals, Milton has contrived to broider the most 
exquisite tissue of poetry, both in blank verse and in lyric measures. 
Nothing quite like the former had yet been seen. The author is much 
under the influence of that later form of the playwrights' 
blank verse wliich admits the redundant syllable very ''^ y'ers'e."^ 
frequently, and he has boldly borrowed the system of 
trisyllabic equivalence, which in them was certainly to a great extent, 
and may be suspected to have been almost wholly, based on the mere 
necessities of conversation. His own verse tirades, or passages which 
are only in form dialogue, are really independent pieces of poetry. 
By these means and others he also elaborates that " verse paragraph " 
the introduction of which was to be perhaps his greatest contribution 
to the English Ars Poetica. The redundant syllable is indeed rather 
abused, and it is in this, and perhaps in this only, that Coiiuts is 
inferior to Paradise Lost. But it is difficult to use the word inferior 
in any connection with such incomparable work as the Spirit's overture 
and description of his discovery of the Lady's danger, her soliloquy 
before she meets Comus, the Elder Brotlier's fine if rather declamatory 
praise of chastity (saturated with memories of Marlowe's versification 
and homoeoteleiita), the argument of Comus and the Lady, and the 
poet's • account of Sabrina. But the lyric parts (which Sir Henry 



396 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

Wotton in a letter to tlie author justly called ipsa niollities) are cer- 
tainly not inferior, and the last hundred and fifty lines repeat tlie 
success of V Allegro and its fellow in metrical effect, with more 
variety and an even higher and more airy strain. 

Nor do the graver cast and the more disputable material 

of Lycidas injure, save to very unhappily constituted persons, its 

poetical effect. Its two hundred lines are arranged on a decasyllabic 

basis which is never exceeded, though it is allowed, 

•^^" ""'■ somewhat on the principle of a choric ode, to descend to 
eights, and even to sixes. Further, though the piece rhymes through- 
out (save for a few lines left " in the air," and yet, by a perfect 
miracle of art, contributing to tlie music as their sound floats un- 
answered), the rhymes are ranged neither regularly in couplets nor 
regularly in stanzas, though, for instance, the close is a complete 
octave, abababcc. The whole has an extremely cunning system, not 
strophic but symphonic, so that the music, though never broken, is 
never complete in any section till the whole has closed. As an elegy 
deriving from the Alexandrian-Sicilian school, Lycidas has in its turn 
served as model to other English dirges of the first interest, espe- 
cially Adonais and Thyrsis ; but it exceeds both in variety and uni- 
formity of merit, though it is not the equal of Adonais in loftiness of 
thought and in the poetical quality of certain passages. No English 
poem exhibits a more exquisite harmony and variety of numbers, or 
a more extraordinary science of rhyme, while very few of anything 
like the same length have a greater number of signal phrases memo- 
rable for thought or music or both. Indeed, except the untimely 
speech of St. Peter, which is at the very best a vigorous piece of 
satiric verse, there is not a passage and hardly a line which is not 
mere and sheer poetry. The poem, moreover, adds to the knowledge 
of Milton's powers in several minor ways, especially in regard to his 
extraordinary skill in the use of names. Something of this had been 
seen before, but not to the extent of the wonderful triplet — 

Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, 

Where the great vision of the guarded mount 

Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold. 

We care nothing about Bellerus or Namancos or Bayona as persons 
or places, but we feel, we know, that as words they are right and 
indispensable. And the passage also exhibits two other main devices 
of Milton's, the putting of the adjective, especially a monosyllabic 
adjective, after the noun, and the cunning interchange of syllables in 
adjective and substantive by pairs. ^ 

1 I "Great vision," adj. = i syll., subs. = 2. 

/ " Guarded mount," adj. = 2 syll., subs. = I. , 



CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 397 

The batch of sonnets which forms a bridge over the twenty 
middle years of Milton^s life has varied interest. They are very few 
in number; tliey do not, even with those in Italian, 
which fall out of our purview, reach the end of the 
second dozen. The history of their reputation is strange, for even after 
making every possible allowance for the " point of view " and for the 
depreciation of the sonnet as a trifling thing, we cannot now under- 
stand the contempt with which the eighteenth century regarded them 
as not even good of their kind. They are historically of great 
importance, because they mark that return from the true English or 
Shakespearian form of the sonnet to the Petrarchian model which 
has been generally, though not universally, observed since. This, it 
must be repeated, though a perfectly legitimate consequence of 
Milton's devotion to Italian, was in no sense a change from corrupt 
to pure. The one kind of cjuatorzain is from every point of view 
exactly as legitimate as tlie other, which was itself only the survivor 
of divers Italian kinds. Yet again iVIilton's sonnets are interesting 
because they are almost the first instance of perception, on the part 
of an English poet, of the unmatched suitableness of the sonnet form 
for the purposes of " occasional " poetry. Before Milton the sonnet 
had been very generally written in sequences, and almost invariably 
devoted to the subject of love — a subject for which it is no doubt 
supremely but by no means exclusively suited. Since his day, 
though, it has received further extensions, especially the topographical 
(the discovery of which is the great glory of Bowles), and the descrip- 
tive-pictorial, where Rossetti reigns almost alone. But Milton's 
innovation, or rather extension, invited not only these but almost all 
others of whatsoever kind, as will be seen from their subjects — The 
Nightingale, His own Twenty-third Year, The Imminent Cavalier 
Attack on London, To a Virtuous Young Lady, To Lady Margaret 
Ley, three political-controversial (one of them a twenty-lined '' tail " 
sonnet), To Lawes the Musician, On Mrs. Catharine Thomson, 
to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane, On the Massacre in Piedmont, On 
his Blindness, To his friends Lawrence and Skinner, and On his 
Deceased Second Wife. Thus we have love, meditation, ethical 
compliment, epicede, polemic, and, in the most miscellaneous sense, 
'' occasional" verse, all exemplified in this little handful. 

They are far from being of equal value, and the extreme badness 
of some may, though it never should, have caused the depreciation 
of others. The divorce and political sonnets, for instance, simjDly 
display ill-temper and pique, trying to masquerade as banter in 
doggerel verse. Yet even here Milton's irrepressible talent for 
melodious and majestic phrase will break out, as in the line — 
Which after held the sun and moon in fee, 



398 CAROLINE LITERATURE 



and almost everywhere else the good gifts predominate altogether, or 
very nearly so. Even the very early and comparatively common- 
place "Nightingale'"^ is full of them. The stately cadence of the 
"Three-and-twentieth Year" hides, as is not always the case, the 
author's proneness to take himself very seriously indeed. " The 
Assault " is a pair to it ; the personal sonnets to or on others suit 
themselves to the dominant of comment or praise, or whatever it may 
be, with marvellous art; and the two finest of all, the "Massacre" 
sonnet and the " Blindness," develop the form on the side of 
grandeur in a way which has never been excelled, and, even in the 
abundant and sometimes consummate sonnet-practice of the present 
century, very seldom equalled. 

With respect to the three great poems of his last fifteen years, it 
is noticeable as to their matter that we have from his own hand 
a long list of subjects for poems, of which the majority are taken 

from the sacred history and the rest from the early 
^poimT' chronicles of Britain, both South and North; secondly, 

as to the form of Sai/ison Agonistes, that all these sub- 
jects appear to have been originally intended as tragedies in the 
Senecan form. We may reasonably connect this scheme with that 
curious dislike of rhyme and of modern poetical forms generally 
which made the admirer of Shakespeare and the author of the 
exquisite rhymed early poems endeavour to reverse the course of the 
English genius both in respect of rhyme and in respect of dramatic 
arrangement. As for Paradise I^sf, the subject, as we should 
expect, had already, independently of the Miracle plays, been treated 
dramatically, and the fact is proper to be taken notice of by those who 
busy themselves with the subject of Milton's alleged indebtedness to 
other writers. What is jjroper to be said here on that subject may 
here be said very briefly. Milton has borrowed from these supposed 
originals nothing that makes him Milton ; and the things that he 
may perhaps have borrowed are unimportant. It was, however, 
certain beforehand that so vast a subject as the Fall of Man, partic- 
ularly as it would present itself to one equally enamoured of theo- 
logical disquisition and stocked with profane learning, could not 
possibly be liandled within the compass of an antique drama or even 
a trilogy. We do not know with any precision when the existing 
poem was begun, but it can hardly have been before 1656; and 
we do practically know that it was finished in about seven years 
from that time, though perhaps fear of bringing himself prominently 
before the public, and certainly the interruptions to all business 
caused by the plague in 1665 and the fire in 1666, hindered the 

1 Interesting, as noted before, in connection with the Chaucerian or pseudo- 
Chaucerian Cuckoo and Nightingale. 



CHAP. I CLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 399 

publication. The continuation, or Paradise Regained, is said, though 
only on the authority of the person who derives credit from the 
truth of the story, to have been suggested by EUwood, a Quaker, 
and, lii<e many of the original Quakers, a person of some ability 
and originality. It is not known whether any reason besides the 
fellow-feeling of blindness made Milton select Samson from the large 
number of similar subjects which he had earlier thought of. But the 
community of situation is sufficient reason. 

The exclusive use of blank verse in the epics, and the predomi- 
nance of it in the play, come directly from the craze against rhyme 
just referred to, which is itself not original in Milton, but, as has been 
shown amply already, a common idol (in the Baconian 
sense) of the Renaissance, a fallacy derived from an, in the v'erse*" 
main reasonable, admiration of the ancients. Milton had 
too good an ear to attempt the miserable sapphics and hexameters 
of the generation before, but his very ear suggested, to him that he 
could, merely by variety of cadence and arrangement, supply the 
want of rhyme itself, the objections to which, in narrative as well as in 
dramatic verse, were, as we can see from Dryden's Essay of Dramatic 
Poesy (written, if not published, before Paradise Lost appeared), very 
much in the air at the time. For his own particular purpose, there 
is no doubt that blank verse exceptionally well suited his serried 
argument. His spacious description, his fiery and energetic narrative, 
could not, like the meandering tapestry work of Spense£-efH4TC"Ctoud"- 
and-sky pageantry of Shelley, have endured a regular confinement, 
even in such comparatively roomy bounds as those of the Spenserian, 
much less in any smaller stanza. The couplet would have per- 
petually teased and cramped him. He needed and he achieved the 
large and infinitely varied freedom of the verse paragraph which only 
blank verse allows, and which he himself could punctuate and vary 
in cadence till it acquires almost the beauty and the proportion of the 
stanza itself. We cannot, therefore, regret that he made these 
experiments ; but it is entirely illegitimate to conclude from them 
that rhyme is a superfluity in non-dramatic, as it certainly is in 
dramatic, verse. A man may paint supremely with one finger, but he 
will do best to use the five that nature has given him. 

Considerable difference of structure is noticeable in the deca- 
syllabic verse of the three poems, even independently of those 
general characteristics of Miltonic verse which had best be noticed 
together and presently. In Paradise Lost the tendency, which has 
been noticed in Comus, to indulge too much in the redundant syllable 
is, on the whole, corrected. But the practice of enjainbement, or 
running on from one line to the other, is extended to the fullest 
dramatic license, and forms indeed the chief instrument (with the 



400 CAROLINE LITERATURE nooK vn 

variety of phiase whicli is contingent upon it) in the architecture of 
the verse paragraph. In Paradise Regained redundancy makes its 
appearance again ; and in Samson Agonist cs — perhaps deHberately, the 
dramatic form inviting it, perhaps as a mere consequence of an uncon- 
scious tendency — it becomes very prominent indeed. There is a 
difference, too, in phrase. The stately yet seldom over-gorgeous 
or over-stiff Miltonic diction reaches its acme in Paradise Lost ; and, 
if a little less sweet and graceful than in the early poems, is still 
more accomplished, still more "inevitable," still more suited to con- 
vince all good judges that it cannot be better done at the time, for the 
purpose, and in the context. In the best passages of Paradise 
Regained there is no falling off in this respect; but elsewhere there 
is, and the absence of splendour and succulence in the diction, joined 
to tlie occasional rela.xation of the verse, makes that danger of the 
prosaic, which waits so constantly on I^lank verse, sometimes seem too 
imminent here. The process continues furtlier in Samson, where the 
great patlios and greater dignity of the action cannot hinder the blank- 
verse parts' from being at once too dry and too loose. But here the 
choruses come to the rescue with their despised auxiliary rhyme and 
their exceeding beauty, while even their unrhymed Pindaric sections, 
though perhaps confessing a relaxing grasp of the paragraph- 
symphony, serve to vary the effect. 

The substance of the three needs no praise, little account, and 
only a hint that, though never below, it is sometimes either above or 
outside the most appropriate themes of verse. Light treatment is 

rarely called for, and is never successfully given. But 
matt^er. ^he mere narrative is, in Paradise Lost at any rate, 

managed with extraordinary skill ; the personal touches, 
in reference chiefly to the blindness, both here and in San/son, give 
pathos without impertinence ; the shorter poetical jewels are innumer- 
able ; and even the longer passages, many, if not most, of which 
could stand almost as substantive poems, would make a most 
formidable list. In blank verse out of drama we have few things 
that can approach, and nothing that excels, the picture of Pandemonium 
and its inhabitants ; the scene with Sin and Death ; the journey 
through Chaos; the address to Light at the beginning of Book III.; 
Satan's vision of the Sin and his speech on Niphates ; the description 
of paradise ; the discovery by Ithuriel and the subsequent debate ; 
parts of the story of Raphael ; the Temptation ; the change of nature 
thereafter ; and the riot of names in the description of the view from 
the topmost mount of Paradise. All these are in Paradise I^ost, and 
the sequel adds, though fewer and farther between, the great confes- 
sion of Satan, " 'Tis true I am that spirit unfortunate"; the dream of 
Christ, and the morning scene after it, with its traces of Milton's 



CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 401 

reading in romance ; the second prospect from the mount ; the views 
of Rome and Athens ; the storm ; and, above all, the final moment 
on the golden spire of the Temple. Yet perhaps it is not in passages 
that Milton's greatness appears so decidedly as in the great achieve- 
ment and attainment of the general scheme of his poems on the one \ 
hand, and the marvellous perfection of the single line and phrase on • 
the other. 

The extreme importance of Milton in English poetry has been 
already referred to, but must be now somewhat more fully, though 
still briefly, dwelt upon. He represents — and almost exhausts — 
the fourth great influence in English prosody. We have ,,■,, . 1 

s> 1 Milton s place 

already seen how Chaucer gathered together and put, in English 
with an immense contribution of his own, the results ^'^°^° ^' 
of the struggles of Middle English towards such a prosody, and 
how his example, followed blindly and with a tongue as stammer- 
ing as the eyes were dim, lasted for more than a century, till the 
changes of the language put it for the moment aside ; how Spenser, 
partly returning to it, partly gathering up de novo the results of the 
experiments of his immediate forerunners and the general influences 
of the Renaissance, gave poetry a fresh start ; and, lastly, how the 
dramatists, and especially Shakespeare, suppled and shook out the 
texture of the decasyllabic line, varied its cadence, stocked it (on 
the principles of equivalence or slur) with a great number of new 
foot-combinations, while the lyric and stanza poetry of the fifty years 
between the Calendar and Milton's " Three-and-twentieth Year" 
sonnet almost exhausted the possibilities of less uniform verse. 

At the time which we have reached, as we have seen already, and 
shall see still more, the stream of original poetic thought was slacken- 
ing ; even the lyric composition, though almost more exquisite than 
ever, was dwindling in range, height, and strength, and tending to 
an exquisite prettiness rather than to passion or splendour; and, 
above all, the extreme laxity of structure into which the drama had 
degenerated was either rendering verse (as in the drama itself) mere 
hobbling prose, or by reaction was creating the sharply separated 
couplet, a form admirable for the lower varieties of poetry, not so 
admirable for the higher. 

Just at this time came Milton, a poet with an exquisite ear and 
extraordinary science of form, great learning in his own and other 
languages, and a predilection for the special form of non-dramatic 
blank verse which, managed as he manages it, at once counteracts the 
effect of the sharp snip-snap couplet and of the wandering, involved, 
labyrinthine stanza. He tightened up the metre without unduly 
constricting it ; he refined the expression without making it jejune. 
And in particular his need of an extremely varied line to construct 
2 D 



402 CAROLINE LITERATURE 



his paragraphs and supply the want of rliyme-music, made him, 
without adopting the sheer abandonment of the late dramatic verse, 
resort to every artifice of metrical distribution to avoid monotony. 

So intricate and constant is this artifice that some have even 
imagined the invention by him of a " new prosody " not reducible to 
ordinary laws, or have resorted to the supposition of extrametrical 
syllables. As to this last, it can only be said that the existence of 
an extrametrical syllable anywhere but at the beginning or end of 
a line proves the imcompetence of the poet. Extrametrical syllables 
are the •' epicycles " of criticism. It is true that there are a very few 
lines in Milton where no more than nine syllables can be made out by 
any artifice ; and we must here suppose, either that he has followed 
Virgil's example in leaving these lines designedly incomplete, or else 
that he has, with rather doubtful judgment, borrowed from some 
other metres the license of making the initial foot monosyllabic, with 
strong stress and pause to serve for the missing half. It is true also 
that, probably seduced by his affection for Italian (in which language 
the prevailing cadence is always trochaic rather than iambic), he has 
substituted the trochee rather more freely than altogether suits the 
genius of English. But, with these two provisos, every line of his can 
be scanned with perfect strictness as an iambic of five feet in which 
the following feet are admissible, strictly speaking, in any place — 
iambus, trochee, anaprest, dactyl, and tribrach — while a redundant 
syllable is allowed in the last. With such precision, and on the 
whole such judgment, did he apply these principles, that in a certain 
sense English prosody up to the present time has gone no farther. 
Very many new metrical combinations have, of course, been invented, 
and the eighteenth century for a long time discarded, or used very 
gingerly, his licenses of equivalence and pause. But he practically 
put English prosody on the footing which it has maintained ever 
since ; and, except in the few and always unsuccessful cases where 
poets have deliberately set themselves to attempt a new prosody, 
every poet from Dryden to Mr. Swinburne can be accounted for on 
the system applicable to him. His pattern of blank verse, admii-able 
as a variation, is not a complete substitute for couplet or stanza ; his 
vocabulary, at least in his later poems, may be objected to as un- 
necessarily stiff and loaded. But his prosody in the strict sense is 
exhaustive. No one up to his time (tliough Shakespeare had 
practically included everything) had deliberately and formally sys- 
tematised all things ; no one since his time has added anything 
new in principle. 

The position now for two centuries assigned to Milton was 
during his lifetime held by Abraham Cowley.^ This poet, whose 

1 In Chalmers. More completely in Dr. Grosart's " Chertsey Worthies." 



CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 403 



popularity, extraordinarily high and extraordinarily brief, was not 
quite so unreasonable as his loss of it, was a Londoner born ten 
years after Milton, in 1618. He went to Westminster, 
and thence to Cambridge. He certainly wrote verse, °^ ^' 
and good verse, very early, for some of it was published when he was 
fifteen ; but whether his reading and emulation of Spenser really 
enabled him to produce some of these poems at ten years old must 
be left to the reader. He had but just taken his Master's degree 
in 1643 when Cambridge fell into the power of the Parliamentarians 
and he was ejected, went to Oxford, where he stayed for two years, 
and then going with Henrietta Maria to Paris, became her secretary. 
After some ten years' stay abroad, in 1656 he returned to England, 
and was arrested, but received his liberty on condition of some in- 
definite compliances which are vaguely and differently related. He 
returned to France till the Restoration, and was then, like many 
other Royalists, disappointed in hopes which Charles H. was 
perhaps not too careful to satisfy, but which he certainly could not 
in all cases have satisfied if he would. Nor was it very long before 
a beneficial lease of the Queen's lands gave him competence, if not 
affluence. He retired, however, in some dudgeon to Chertsey, and 
died there — not finding the country quite the poet's paradise — in 
July 1667. 

Cowley's remarkable prose may be for the present put aside. 
In his verse he is not merely a most curious bridge of communica- 
tion between the couplet poets, the " school of good-sense," and the 
metaphysicals, but almost more than Waller, and much more than 
Denham, the pair who usually go with him, a bridge between one 
whole period of poetry and another. He wrote in youth a play 
called The Cicardian, which he did not then intend for the stage, 
but after the Restoration altered and acted as Cutter of Cole/naji 
Street. But this requires no special notice. His purely poetical 
works, which are by no means so easily to be distinguished by mere 
chronological order as might be thought likely, fall pretty easily into 
three classes when judged from the point of view of form — namely, 
couplet verse, lyrics and stanza poems of various kinds, and 
Pindarics. 

Of the couplet verse the most important piece in size, as indeed 
it is of the wliole, is the curious sacred epic of the Davideis, much 
of which was written at Cambridge, though it was continued (it never 
was completed) later. Four books exist ; yet even this 
manageable length, assisted by Cowley's immense popu- 
larity, never made it generally read. There are unquestionably fine 
things in it — from the opening picture of Hell, earlier by much than 
that of Milton, through the sketch of the Priests' College, a favourite 



404 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

theme with the author, and worked out by him also in prose, to 
David's account of Saul and of Jonathan. And the passages of 
length are as a rule inferior to the single lines and couplets, which 
are sometimes wonderfully fine. But the miscarriage of tiie piece as 
a whole may be accounted for many times over. It is true, as 
Johnson urges, that the story, being merely begun, has no time to 
justify itself, that its amplification of familiar Scripture is felt as 
impertinent, and that the decorations exhibit the fatal fault of the 
" metaphysicals " almost in the worst degree. But there is more than 
this. The very accomplishment of the couplets now and then 
jars with the phraseology and imagery, as would not have been the 
case in stanza or blank verse ; and, little story as the poet gives 
himself room to tell, he interferes with the interest even of what little 
there is by constant divagation. The book is a museum of poetic 
fragments tastelessly cemented together, not an organic whole. 

In his other couplet pieces, from quite early things to the trans- 
lations intercalated in the Essays, Cowley shows much better, or at 
any rate is much more accessible, as a pioneer in the path. The 
piece upon the " Happy Birth of the Duke of Gloucester" in 1640, 
though sometimes '' enjambed," shows on the whole a great preference 
for, and a pretty complete command of, the authentic, balanced, self- 
contained couplet with the cracker of rhyme at the tail of it. We 
only want weight to give us Dryden, and polish to give us Pope : the 
form is there already. 

In his stanza-poems and l3Tics proper Cowley shows the retro- 
spective side of his poetic Janus-head, though it is observable that 
even in Constantia and P/iiletns, one of the earliest of the Jmjejiilia, 
the concluding couplets of the sizain " snap " as they 
yrics. ^Q^j^ j^q|. iiavg done in Daniel or in Drayton. The 
lyrics are often quite Jonsonian, while sometimes they have a light- 
ness which Ben rarely achieved, and which is chiefly proper to his 
"sons," of whom Cowley was born just too late to be one. The 
famous C/iroincle, his best-known thing, is the very best of poetic 
froth ; while the Anacreontics are often equal to Ben, and some- 
times not very far below Milton. One is frequently inclined to give 
Cowley a really high place, when something — his shallowness or his 
frigid wit, or a certain '' shadow before " of eighteenth-century prose 
— interferes, especially in his once adored Mistress. 

Undoubtedly, however, Cowley's Pindarics are the most peculiar 

efforts of his talent, and those which, upon his own time, produced 

most of the effect of genius. They are little read now, and there 

The Pin- Can be no doubt that both their structure and the 

darics. presumed necessity of imitating Pindar's style of obscure 

conceit encouraged the metaphysical manner very treacherously. 



BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 405 



But they would be interesting to us even were they far worse than 
they are intrinsically, because to the historian of literature nothing can 
ever be uninteresting which has, for a long time, supplied an obvious 
literary demand on the part of readers and provided employment for 
great writers. To Cowley we owe — in that sense of obligation which 
always presupposes remembrance, that the debt would have been due 
to another if this man had not been in case to lend — the really 
magnificent odes of Dryden, Gray, and Collins pretty directly ; in- 
directly that still greater one of Wordsworth which is almost his 
solitary claim to have reached the highest summits of jioetry ; and 
many great things of Shelley and Tennyson, not to mention lesser 
men. And the eager adoption of the form, which for more than half 
a century produced libraries full of unreadable Pindarics (the most 
interesting and nearly the most hopeless examples being those of no 
less a man than Swift), shows us what the time wanted, how it 
was sick of the regular stanza, how blank verse was still a little too 
bold for it, while it had not yet settled down or become satisfied with 
the regular tick of the couplet-clock. But as a matter of fact the 
things themselves are not contemptible. " Life and Fame," " Life," 
the "Ode to Mr. Hobbes," and others are, or at least contain, very 
fine things ; and the chief drawback of the whole is that descent to 
colloquial abbreviations (''I'm," etc.) which was due partly to the 
slow vulgarising of popular taste on such points which we shall have 
to record, partly to the still prevailing dread of slur and trisyllabic 
equivalence. On the whole, no doubt, Rochester was right when he 
said ("profanely," as Dryden very properly adds) that "Cowley 
was not of God, and so he could not stand." But the special reason 
of his fall was that he never could make up his mind whether to 
stand with the old age or with the new, with the couplet or with the 
v/ilder verse, with mystical fantasy or clear common sense, with 
lawless splendour or jejune decency. 

One splendid passage — which, by the way, did not appear in 
the first edition of the poem, Cooper''s Hill, that contains it — has 
preserved to Sir John Denham ^ a little of the very disproportionate 
reputation which he earned during his life, thanks 
chiefly to his younger contemporary Dryden's generous 
eulogy of it. He was born in DubHn, and of Irish parentage on his 
mother's side, in 1615; had at Oxford and Lincoln's Inn a reputa- 
tion for idleness and extravagance, especially in gambling ; obtained 
some fame in 1641 by The Sophy, and published Cooper'' s Hill soon 
afterwards ; lived chiefly at Oxford during the war, and chiefly in 
France after it ; was knighted at the Restoration, and received a 

J In Chalmers. 



4o6 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

valuable place, the surveyorship of the king's buildings ; was unlucky 
in marriage, became disordered in mind, and died on loth April 
1668. 

Few, except for studious curiosity, are ever likely again to read 
Denham through, or even any considerable part of his not extensive 
work. The Sophy is a feeble tragedy ; Cooper's Hill, putting aside 
the patch 

Oil ! could I flow like thee 

and a few other fine lines, is chiefly a creditable, and tolerably though 
not very early, exercise in the new kind of couplet. A verse para- 
phrase of the Second Aeneid adopts the older and looser " enjambed " 
form of the same measure ; indeed, this enjambment is common in 
Denham, and is found in Cooper'^s Hill itself. Priidence, Justice, Old 
Age (of all odd things a verse handling of the De Senectute), The 
Progress of Learning, are preludes to the eighteenth-century concert 
of couplet tunes on things not tunable. The smaller poems, with 
occasional flashes, such as the happy transformation (for translation 
it is not) of Martial's Non ego sum Curius nee Nunia nee Titius into 

I pretend not to the wise ones 
To the grave or the precise ones, 

and a few pieces of some nobility like the elegy on Cowley and the 
attack on Love in favour of Friendship, are apt to oscillate between 
the tastelessly fantastical and the merely gross. Moreover, Denham 
is an eminent sinner in the small matters of grammar, rhyme, and 
measure which disgrace so many writers in the middle and later part 
of the seventeenth century and are obviously due not to any imper- 
fect condition of the language, but to sheer carelessness and a down- 
at-heel fashion of literature. He has occupied the place between 
Cowley and Waller as the " three reformers of our numbers " so long, 
that he has established a title to it by prescription ; and as it has long 
been understood what this " reform of numbers " meant, there is the 
less reason for turning him out. But he is much less of a poet than 
Cowley, while it is an injustice to couple his slatternly muse with the 
neat and graceful, if not radiantly lovely or bewitching, muse of 
Edmund Waller. ^ 

This curious person, whose actual poetical achievements were 

helped by accidents of all kinds, including social position, wealth, long 

life, and the fact that the greatest English writer of his latest days 

was a man of singular modesty and generosity towards 

his contemporaries, was born in Hertfordshire, but of a 

family connected by property with the neighbouring county of Bucks, 

1 In Chalmers, and recently in "The Muses' Library." 



CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 407 

and by extraction with Kent, on 3rd March, 1605. He succeeded as 
a mere child to a very large fortune, was educated at Eton and 
King's College, Cambridge, and early introduced to court. 

This was an age of precocity, but Waller's was certainly very re- 
markable, for he was not eighteen when he wrote his poem on Prince 
Charles's escape from shipwreck at Santander ; and there is no doubt 
that the cast of the couplets in which it is written is unlike anything 
before except mere scraps and fragments, and almost exactly like 
what was to prevail for an entire century, and, with Pope's refinements, 
for nearly two. When we remember that the time of his writing 
such couplets as 

With the sweet sound of this harmonious lay 
About the keel delighted dolphins play 

was the year of the publication of the first folio of Shakespeare, that 
it was seven years only after his death and seven more before the 
birth of Dryden, that Milton was a boy at school, that Drayton, 
Jonson, Chapman were alive and to be so for many years more, that 
Fletcher was not dead and Cowley a child of five years old, the thing 
is certainly surprising enough. 

Waller was to live sixty-four years longer, nor was his life unevent- 
ful. He increased his wealth by marrying a city heiress, who died 
very soon, and is said only in his widower state to have begun to 
court Lady Dorothy Sidney, — '• Sacharissa," — who would not have him. 
" Amoret " is said by a less confident tradition to have been Lady 
Sophia Murray. He actually married a lady of less distinguished 
position, by whom he had many children. His fortune naturally 
opened Parliament to him, but his political career was not fortunate 
or creditable. In the Short Parliament he was an active member of 
the Opposition. In the Long, though he was a relation of Hampden, 
he became somewhat less antagonistic to the court, and though he 
continued to sit after the final breach, was in a manner persona ^^ra/a 
to Charles, with whom he was sent to negotiate. Had what is 
known as Waller's Plot — for the details of which we must refer to 
history — succeeded, or had he shown more fortitude at its failure, 
Waller's name might have been at least as favourably known in 
historical as in poetical records. Unluckily, on the plot's discovery 
and his own arrest he confessed everything in regard to himself, 
informed against others, urged them to do the like, was at least part 
cause of the execution of his own brother-in-law Tomkyns, and 
himself escaped with life, exile, a fine of ten thousand pounds, and a 
hopelessly damaged reputation, which was not much mended by his 
making his peace with Cromwell, his kinsman and the subject of one 
of his best poems. As he had wit and wealth he was welcome at 



4o8 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

Whitehall after the Restoration, sat in several Parliaments, and only 
missed the Provostship of Eton (for which he asked) because he was 
ineligible as a layman. He survived Charles II., is said to have 
given his infatuated successor good advice, and died in 1687. 

Waller, as his own age would have said, wrote poetry like a 
gentleman ; that is to say, he neither published often nor attempted 
anything of great magnitude, but his very early beginnings and his 
very long life enabled him to put together a considerable poetical 
baggage. We have noticed his first couplet poem ; it was followed 
by others, of which the chief are that on the Duke of Buckingham's 
death, which is quite in Dryden's earlier manner forty years later ; a 
batch of complimentary poems to persons of the court of Charles I. 
from the Queen downward ; another, written at Penshurst and full of 
the " Sacharissa ■" affair ; the Battle of tJie Smnvier Islands (Waller's 
longest poem except the later Divine Love, and like it remarkable 
for the extreme shortness of the cantos, which contain only a few 
score lines each) ; and the Instnictions to a Painter, on the fighting 
at sea in 1665. The panegyric on the Protector is in the quatrain, 
being written at the time when Gondibert {vide infra) had made that 
form fashioi^able, but the quatrains are merely pairs of couplets, and 
are not the equal of Dryden's somewhat later " heroic stanzas " on 
Cromwell's death, still less of Annus Mirabilis. 

Of the smaller lyrics, which, like his "reform of our numbers," 
made Waller's reputation with his own time, one, "Go. Lovely Rose," is 
universally known, and with the almost equally popular "On a Girdle" 
forms an almost sufficient sample for judgment. As was said above. 
Waller's muse always presents herself in irreproachable condition, not 
a curl out of place, not a spot or crease on her dress, the colours 
chosen with sufficient taste, the arrangement made with sufficient 
skill. Only, some critics think her features insignificant and her ex- 
pression quite devoid of air and fire. Once or twice, indeed, the 
spirit of lyric verse and of intense though fantastic poetry which was 
still abroad does descend on Waller, as in the famous comparison 
between Sacharissa and Amoret (" Sacharissa's beauty's wine," etc.), 
and better still in the really magnificent image (proving the truth of 
its own sentiment, for it seems to occur in his last work) — 

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, 

Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made. 

Not often was Waller so happily metaphysical. 

As something general was said of Milton's influence on the course 
of poetry, so we must also consider briefly the influence of these his 
contemporaries in a direction different indeed from his, but so far to 
be connected with it that they too were innovating, and were innovat- 



ciiAi'. 1 BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 409 

ing in directions to be followed afar and freely by their poetical 
successors. 

A good deal has been written on the exact origin of this change in 
poetry from varied and rather loose measures to the tight, neat, heroic 
couplet — French influence being the point most hotly contested. It is 
undeniable that the court of Henry IV. did exercise certain ^^^ 
influences on that of James I., and that in the former, " reform of 
under Malherbe and Balzac respectively, the tide was """^ ""mbers." 
turning from ornate and fantastic standards of verse and prose to more 
correct and more frigid models. But the phenomenon is much more 
one of coincidence than of imitation, though it is impossible to deny 
that the change had begun and been very conspicuous in France long 
before the earliest experiments of Waller. That poet, according to 
his own account, found his chief predecessor in Fairfax (see p. 357, 
(7//fe) ; more recently an ancestor has been found for him in George 
Sandys,^ his senior at least. To insist, however, too curiously or too 
peremptorily on either connection would be only to vary the mistake 
in regard to French influence. In most cases literary changes are 
not initiated by any one person, or even by any one country. They 
are in the air, the wind scatters the seeds of them, and they spring up 
more or less simultaneously, and even with a certain appearance of 
spontaneity. Only later, when some very commanding genius gives 
them a home, as here in the case of Uryden, does deliberate imita- 
tion play a large part in their diff'usion. 

Generally, the preference for and practice of the couplet may be 
said to be only one more instance of the eternal " see-saw," of that 
alternation between the plain and the ornate, between the vast and 
vague and the cabined and correct, which pervades the whole his- 
tory of literature in verse and in prose alike. In particular, the 
couplet accommodated itself better to the special poetical desires 
of the age, and still more to those which were coming to its successor. 
The time was ceasing (without complete knowledge that it ceased) to 
care for passionate and romantic narrative. Its love-poetry, though 
still retaining an exquisite sweetness, was sinking towards gallantry 
and badinage. Its leaning in didactic verse was shifting from the 
metaphysical and theological to the scientific and merely ethical. It 
was acquiring a strong craving for satire — • political and other. Above 
all, it was becoming gradually less dreamy and more businesslike, 
while its critical tendencies in the lower sense were also being 

1 Sandys (1577-1643), a traveller and a translator, who wrote good prose as 
well as verse, published rather late, translations of Ovid (1632), paraphrases of the 
Scriptures (1636 and later), a tragedy, C/ir/sfs Passiof/, etc. (ed. Hooper, 2 vols. 
London, 1872). Sandys uses various metres, but has a distinct and early com- 
mand of the couplet. 



4IO CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

awakened. For all these purposes the stanza, the sonnet, and the 
other forms dearest to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans proper were 
extremely ill-suited. They all demanded oratorical point, clean 
hitting, and mathematical arrangement, for which the couplet was as 
well suited as the others were unapt. And though, even after nearly 
a century, it is difficult to get our ears to accept the fact, there is no 
doubt that to those surfeited with other sounds the sharp rattle, the 
regular tick, as it may be called, of this couplet was a grateful and 
agreeable change. We still have to make a positive effort to under- 
stand what four or five generations meant by saying that Waller had 
invented and Dryden perfected ''harmony" and "smoothness of 
numbers." Mere study will indeed show us that the couplet had " 
already acquired over these generations such a mastery that when 
they talked thus they were really thinking of the couplet itself only ; 
and no doubt the couplets of Waller, still more of Dryden, are vastly 
smoother and more harmonious than those of Drayton or Daniel. As 
for other metres, one reason why the eighteenth century was unjust is 
simply that it was ignorant. Except a few antiquarian students like 
Oldys in the first half and Warton in the second, very few men indeed 
in all probability had ever opened Chrisfs Victory or P/iilarete, the 
songs of Campion or the sonnets of his contemporaries. Good wits 
who read Spenser did like him ; though it is clear, even from their 
imitations, that they had lost the key to his true music, that it was in 
more senses than one out of time to them. Great harm has been 
done in literary history, and much labour wasted, by refusing to 
accept facts of this kind, and persevering in a fruitless and too often 
misleading attempt to get behind them, to account for them. Simple 
acceptance, not from pusillanimity or laziness, but in a wise passive- 
ness, is the best attitude, and nowhere more so than here. 



CHAPTER II 

THE METAPHYSICALS — THE LYRIC POETS — THE /(J J&'"'Xp6w 

MISCELLANISTS, ETC. 

Meaning of the term " metaphysical " — Ciashaw — George Herbert — Vaughan 
'^ Herrick — Carew — Randolph — Habington — Cartvvright — Corbet — Suck- * 
ling — Lovelace — Cleveland and others — Marvell — Bishop King — Sher- 
burne, Godolphin, Stanley, Cotton, Brome — Quarles, More, Beaumont — 
Davenant — Chamberlay ne — Miscellanies 

It may seem unreasonable to have noticed the two most famous and A 
characteristic of the school of poets whom Johnson dubbed meta- 
physical — namely, Donne and Cowley — before devoting any special 
explanation to that word and to the thing which it was intended to 
denote; but there are good reasons for the postponement. In the 
first place, Donne is anterior by nearly a whole generation to those 
who are usually classed with him ; he was some forty years older 
than Cowley, and it is probable that he wrote next to none of his 
characteristic work after Cowley was born. The lumping of the 
two together, and of both with others, has led to the most grotesque 
blunders, such as that which Wordsworth makes in representing 
Donne's style as a decadence and reaction from that of men who 
were actually younger than himself. In the second place, Cowley, 
though undoubtedly one of the chiefs of the school that Johnson 
meant to portray, is, as has been seen, but half a metaphysical, and 
has a common-sense face as well as a fantastic one. 

The very term " metaphysical " has been quarrelled with, and not 
quite unjustly, but there is also some justice in itself. We must not 
understand " metaphysical" here in its strict philosophical sense, nor 
in that of Shakespeare's " metaphysical aid " (that is to Meaning of 
say, "supernatural"), nor, of course, in that accidental "metaphysi- 
one which is said to have originated the actual word. But cal." 
it is not inappropriately used for the habit, common to this school of 
poets, of always seeking to express something after, something be- 
hind, the simple, obvious first sense and suggestion of a subject. 

411 



412 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

Johnson has indeed not made so much of his term as he might ; 
for he himself only attributes to his '' metaphysicals," as their differ- 
entia, learning, with a kind of misplaced wit, and the desire to say 
something that had never been said before. The metaphysical Caroline 
school had all these things, but these things were not peculiar to 
them. The Euphuists, in fact, had had them all. But until them- 
selves the quest after the remote, the search for the after-sense, for 
contingent and secondary suggestion, had been less marked. The 
Elizabethan " conceit " is very near it ; you may find the meta- 
physical .spirit (as indeed what may you not?) in Shakespeare. But 
between 1630 and 1660, with a certain belated set of appearances 
later still, this metaphysical tendency employed almost all poetry 
except that of Milton, whose intensity melted and transformed this 
as other peculiarities. Butler is a metaphysical humourist, Chamber- 
layne a metaphysical romance-writer, Herbert and Vaughan meta- 
physicals in spiritual poetry, Herrick and Carew, with all their 
minor train, metaphysical amorists of the decorative kind. Crashaw 
is perhaps the chief metaphysical, the type of the whole class ; Cleve- 
land, Flatman, Wild, and others belated and feeble laggards in the 
style. And this style is so much interwoven with the practice of the 
set of poets often called Cavalier Lyrists that it is difficult to dis- 
entangle the two. All, no doubt, owed much to that mighty influence 
of Donne, which was so strangely disconnected from any publication 
of his work. But Donne himself is metaphysical in the greater and 
wider sense. His thoughts, even his conceits, are never far-fetched, 
because his immense and brooding imagination reaches to them all 
without the trouble of fetching. The others have to fetch them; 
they could in some cases hardly go farther, they could in many 
hardly fare worse. 

Let us therefore, for the sake of order and classification, make 
divisions in the abundant group of poets we have before us. Let 
us take the three great sacred metaphysicals, Crashaw, Herbert, 
Vaughan, first ; then pass to the lyric group, Herrick, Carew, LLibing- 
ton, Lovelace, Suckling, and others ; next notice the three, oddly 
contrasted, of the Commonwealth, Davenant, Chamberlayne, and 
Butler; and lastly give some account of the innumerable and curious 
collections of songs, ballads, and the like which succeed the Eliza- 
bethan miscellanies, and serve with less breach than in any other 
department of verse as a connecting chain between the poetry of the 
sixteenth century and the verse of the eighteenth. 

Richard Crashaw,^ who, if he could but have kept himself at his 
own best, would have been one of the greatest of English poets, was 

iSee Chalmer.s. Also ed. Grosart, 2 vols, privately printed, 1872. 



CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 413 

born in London either in 1616 or, as has been made more probable, 
in 1612. He was the son of a clergyman, whose extremely Puritan 
leanings may, as often happens, account for Crashaw's 
subsequent inclination in the opposite direction. Richard 
was educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge, where his college, 
Peterhouse, was as much the centre of High Church teaching 
and feeling as ' Emmanuel was of Puritanism. He refused the 
Covenant in 1644, was deprived of his Fellowship, and went abroad, 
quickly joining the Church of Rome. He died at Loretto, where he 
had been appointed canon, in 1650, and there were rumours that 
he was poisoned. Some of his poems were published during his 
lifetime, others in a posthumous edition, and a certain amount of 
matter certainly, probably, or possibly his has been added since from 
MS. But his best work in English (he was a pretty Latin poet, and 
is said to have been the author of a well-known conceit on the miracle 
of Cana, while he certainly wrote an elegant fancy on the " Bubble ") 
has been known for two centuries and a half. 

Crashaw's poetry, more almost than any other in English, must 
underlie different and nearly irreconcilable judgments, according as 
the judge insists upon measure, order, and the steady working out 
of central ideas in poetry, or prefers casual and irregular bursts of 
expression and fancy. Pope, who rather liked him, expressed a 
typical judgment from the first point of view, the terms of which 
undoubtedly suggested Johnson's criticism of the whole metaphysical 
school. To the great apostle of correctness, "all that regards 
design, form, fable, which is the soul of poetry, all that concerns 
exactness or consent of parts, which is the body," seemed wanting in 
Crashaw; only "pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, stuttering ex- 
pressions, and something of a neat cast of verse — which are properly 
the gems, dress, or loose ornaments of poetry " — are to be found in him 
and in his likes, who should be considered as versifiers and witty men 
rather than as poets. We may formulate a judgment from the extreme 
opposite point in very similar words ; for those who take it would 
doubtless say that in passionate conception (which is the soul of 
poetry) and harmonious metrical expression (which is its body) Cra- 
shaw is at his best very nearly supreme, while he need only be 
found wanting in bulk and arrangement of plan, orderly management 
of means, and self-criticism, which, though useful adjuncts to poetry, 
are common to it with all literature, and do not usually affect its 
special excellence. The right way, as usual, will be between these 
two extremes, but very much nearer to the standpoint of our anony- 
mous enthusiast than to that of Pope. By far the greater part of 
Crashaw's work is devoted to sacred subjects, but some of his best 
and prettiest, if not his most sublime, pieces are secular. The best 



414 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

of these is tlie well-known li'/s/ics to his Supposed Mistress, a decidedly 
whimsical but infinitely graceful thing; and a version from the Italian 
beginning — 

To thy lover, 

Dear, discover. 

But it must by no means be inferred that Crashaw was only master 
of this exquisite trifling, and of the frail skipping measures that best 
suit it. He was at least an equal adept in Pindarics, and in the 
stateliest form of the contemporary couplet ; and his noblest poems 
are composed in measures of this kind. They are also entirely 
devoted to religious subjects. Not indeed that this class of subject 
was, by or in itself, at all a guarantee of unmixed excellence in Cra- 
shaw. His very worst things — things as bad as can be found in 
the wide and various range of metaphysical absurdity — occur in the 
poem The Weeper, on St. Mary Magdalen, which unluckily stands 
in the forefront of his works. The eyes of the penitent are "sister 
springs, Parents of silver-forded rills " ; they are " thawing crystal 
heavens of ever-falling stars"; their tears being "the cream of the 
milky way," cherubs sip of them, and their liquid is bottled by 
angels for new guests of heaven. Further, the eyes are the hour- 
glasses of time ; " walking baths, compendious oceans " ; " fertile 
mothers of simpering sons." Common sense may almost be excused 
if it is indignant and disgusted at these frigid ardours, these fustian 
imitations of brocade. Yet if we turn from this to The Flaming 
Heart, a poem in honour of St. Theresa, and to a hymn addressed 
to the same Saint, we shall find, though still the same pomp and 
prodigality of imagery, nothing frigid, nothing fustian, but an ever 
growing and glowing splendour of sentiment and diction, which 
culminates, in the first named of the two pieces, in the most unerring 
explosion of passionate feeling to be found in English, perhaps in all 
poetry. Crashaw often translated, sometimes from very second-rate 
models like Marino and Strada. He can be made, though by some- 
thing of a garble, the awful example of the style. But he as 
certainly displays its most splendid capabilities. 

An infinitely more popular poet than Crashaw, and certainly a 
more equable, though at the best of both Crashaw towers over him, 
was George Herbert,^ a member of the noble Norman-Welsh family 
of that name, and brother of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. 
He^beA. H^ was born at Montgomery Castle on 13th April 
1593, went to Cambridge, became Fellow of Trinity in 
1615, and Pul)lic Orator four years later, at the early age of twenty- 
six. He held the place for eight years with great distinction, though 

1 Many editions. The " Aldine " was revised by Dr. Grosart (London, 1890). 



CHAP. II THE METAPIIYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 415 

he was charged with the Tault of haughtiness, and seems to have 
looked forward to a poHtical career. But something led him to the 
course of saintly life as a country clergyman, latterly at Bemerton, near 
Salisbury, ^which he pursued for six years, till his early death in 1632. 
His verse (almost entirely included in the well-known collection 
called The TeDiple, which made Crashaw call his Steps to the Temple) 
was not published till after his death, but very soon after, for though 
the date of the first edition is 1633, there are undated copies which 
seem to have been distributed in the previous year. The Temple con- 
~^ists of 160 pieces, arranged partly with a fancy of reference to the 
structural arrangement of a church, beginning with " The Porch " ; partly 
under the heads of the great festivals and services ; often under quite 
fantastic titles, " The Quip," " The Pulley," and so forth. There is 
no prevailing metre — couplets, stanzas, and regular and irregular 
lyrical forms being chosen as may best suit the poet's purpose, while 
occasionally he will even condescend, as in " Easter Wings," to that 
device of adjusting his verse lengths to artificial patterns which 
exq^ted almost more horror than ridicule in the eighteenth century. 

And the note of fantasy is at least as much present in idea and 
-ill diction, though Herbert seldom pushes either to very extravagant 
lengths. In the " Church Porch," which is a string of ethical and 
j^ligious maxims, this fantasy does not often 23ass beyond the almost 
4)roverbial imagery to which we are accustomed in such connections. 
But in the more abstract and doctrinal poems Herbert gives himself 
^a much wider range, and ransacks art and nature for quaint similes, 
sometimes worked out in the fashion of the emblem-poetry then so 
popular. The Game of Bowls ; the real or fancied properties of the 
orange tree ; the Palace of the World, with Wisdom sweeping away its 
^cobwebs. Pleasure adorning it with balconies, Sin splitting the walls 
with stealthy fig-tree growth, Grace shoring them, and Death throwing 
them down ; the imaginary peculiarities of the crocodile and elephant 
— Herbert presses all these and a myriad more into his service. 
Yet the unaffected piety, and perhaps still more the perfect charity, 
of his tone, his abstinence from anything like strife and crying, the 
heavenly peace that pervades him, have made his work tolerated by 
many who are not as a rule very tolerant of conceits. 

As a poet he is certainly not the equal of either Crashaw or 
Vaughan, and in his own quiet fashion he has in the present century' 
been equalled by Keble and surpassed by Miss Christina Rossetti. 
He very seldom transports : the throb of response to the highest and 
happiest thoughts and expressions of the poets is very uncommon in 
reading him ; his is an equable merit, a soothing and healthful 
pleasure, rather than the dazzling excellence, the contagious rapture, 
of the great ones. But he can never be mentioned with contempt 



4i6 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

by any one who loves i^oetry, and lie unctoubtedly holds a high place 
among tliose who have attempted the exceedingly difficult task of 
sacred verse. If his successes are never so great as those of some 
others, it is hardly too much to say that he never fails with the 
maddening failure too common in religious poets, and this is in itself 
a great thing. 

The contrast between Crashaw and Herbert is repeated in that 
between Herbert and Vaughan,i but with certain variations. Henry 
Vaughan — " Silurist," as he called himself, from the seat of his family 
in South Wales, " Swan of Lisk," Olor Iscainis, from 
the river on whose banks he lived — was born in or about 
1622, at a place called Newton, St. Bridget. He and his twin 
brother Thomas (a poet likewise and a diligent writer on occult and 
'• Hermetic " subjects) went to Jesus College, Oxford. He seems to 
have begun the study of law in London, but to have turned to that 
of medicine. He may have actually served in the Royahst forces 
during the Rebellion, and was certainly a strong partisan of the 
King's cause. He retired quietly to Brecon during the usurpation 
and there practised physic. Hardly anything is known of his long 
life. He may have had two wives ; he certainly had one, who 
survived him at his death, on St. George's Day, 1695. He was the 
last of the Caroline school proper. 

His poetry as originally published is contained in four volumes — 
FoeiHS, chiefly secular, in 1646; Si'/ex Sa';i////a;is, his principal book, 
and wholly sacred, in 1651 ; 0/or /scani/s, also sacred, a year later; 
and Thalia Rcdiviva, many years afterwards, in 1678, which returns 
to the secular. There is no doubt (we have his word for it, and 
without his word there could not be any) that Vaughan was greatly 
influenced in all the more remarkable part of his work by Herbert, 
whose poems were published twenty years before Silex Scintillans. 
The relation between the two men is altogether that of master and 
pupil, but in clivers ways. Often Vaughan copies Herbert directly. But 
the spirit of the two was different and resulted differently. Vaughan 
is not more or less pious than Herbert, but his piety is much more 
mystical ; his thoughts are deeper and farther brought. And his 
expression is much less equable. He is seldom fantastic to 
frigidity, but he is often meditative to dulness. He never disgusts, 
but he sometimes tires, because he has not cared, or has not been 
able, to give liis thought clear poetic expression. 

1 The Poems of Vaughan, after being completely accessible only in one of Dr. 
Grosart's privately printed (editions, have been at last edited by Mr. E. K. 
Chambers in two volumes of " The Muses' Library " (London, 1896) . The Sacred 
Poems were provided long since in the Aldine series (ed. Lyte, often reprinted), 
and tliere is an edition of tlie Secular Poems by J. R. Tutin (Hull, 1893). 



CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 417 

There was no real reason on the moral side for the compunc- 
tion which Vaughan, late in life, expressed for his early secular 
poems. But as a profane poet he has nothing above the average of 
dozens of half or wholly forgotten versifiers of his time, and is often 
below that average. His love-poems to Amoret and Etesia are 
sometimes pretty, though never distinguished ; and in octosyllables, 
where he chiefly follows the manner of Jonson, he is at about his 
happiest. His decasyllabic couplets are, as Mr. Chambers has justly 
observed, based on Donne, and on the worst part of Donne, the 
designedly crabbed form of the Satires and some of the Epistles. 
It is as the author of the S/le.v Sciiitillans that Vaughan holds his 
place. And the title itself, which is explained by the frontispiece — a 
heart of flint burning and bleeding under the stroke of a thunderbolt 
from a cloud — is appropriate in more than the pious sense. At times 
there is in Vaughan genuine blood and fire ; but it is by no means 
always, or even very often, that the flint is kindled and melted to 
achieved expression. His most famous and successful things, ''They 
are all gone into a world of light " ; " The World," with its magnifi- 
cent opening — 

I saw Eternity the other night 
Like a great ring of pure and endless light 
All calm as it was bright; 

" The Retreat," with its suggestion of Wordsworth's great ode ; " The 
Storm," with its intensely realised imagery; the quaint and pleasant 
piece beginning, " I walked the other day to spend my hour " ; the 
beautiful "Joy"; "The Garland," with its wonderfully striking picture 
of youthful delusions, and the sharp turn, " I met with a dead man. 
Who thus to me began " ; " The Waterfall," with its Miltonic richness 
and appropriateness of epithet, and a marvellous adaptation of sound 
to sense — these and some other things are not merely in company 
unworthy of them as far as the achieved expression goes, but are 
even for the most part unworthy of themselves. But this inequality 
of expression is redeemed by the almost constant presence of a rare 
and precious tone of thought. The great age of the Church of 
England finds in Vaughan, at his best, its best poetical exponent. 
He stops short of the almost maudlin intoxication with divinity which 
carried Crashaw out of the Church altogether, and he far transcends 
the decent piety of Herbert. 

The pair chosen to follow this trio is in general character strangely 
contrasted with it, though a certain bridge of transition exists in 
Herrick's "Divine" poems. Both Herrick and Carew are far greater 
artists than any of the three just mentioned. But despite of this and 
of the fact that their temper is far more mundane, they are still alike. 



4t8 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

Robert Herrick,' who belonged to a good Leicestershire stock, 

rather remarkably connected with literature through Quarles, Dryden, 
and Swift as well as through himself, was born in London 
in 1591. His father, Nicholas Herrick, a goldsmith, 
died very shortly afterwards by falling out of window. Robert 
was left subject to the guardianship of his uncle, a rich member 
of his father's trade, and by an accident, rare with men of letters 
of the time, we have some letters exchanged between ward and 
guardian, when the former was at Cambridge. Here he was a 
member, first of St. John's College, then of Trinity Hall, and it is 
thought that he had gone to the first-named from Westminster 
School. But despite these letters we still do not know much of him. 
He took his M.A. in 1620, when he was nearly thirty years old, and 
apparently orders in 1629, when he was not far from forty — an entrance 
into the Church nearly as late as Donne's, and even less accounted for. 
At any rate, in the year mentioned, he was presented to the living of 
Dean Prior on the skirts of Dartmoor, at which he rails much, and 
which he occupied till the triumph of the Parliament drove him out. 
His two books of verse, A'fi^/^ Numbers (1647) and Hesperides (1648), 
are differently dated but appeared together. There is absolutely no 
mention of him from this time till 1662, when he was restored to Dean 
Prior; and again there is none till his death and burial in October 
1674, at the age of more than eighty. Moreover, though gossip 
about men of letters was just beginning, there is a strange silence 
about Herrick. The two great chatterers of the time, Howell and 
Aubrey, never mention him, though the former at least must have 
been sometimes, probably often, in his company, as both were "sons" 
of Ben. The Sessions of the Poets and other literary comments 
of his day pass him by ; his work, contrary to the almost universal 
habit of the time, had no commendatory verses prefixed to it, and it 
seems to have remained almost unnoticed till the end of the last 
century. 

Since its recovery, however, there have been natural diversities of 
opinion, justified to some extent by the admixture of bad and good 
which it contains. The two divisions together contain rather more 
than fourteen hundred poems, to which a few doubtful pieces from 
miscellanies or MSS. have to be added. No one extends to more 
than a few pages, and most do not exceed a few lines. They fall 
naturally into three classes : epigrams imitating Jonson, offensively 
personal in tone and coarse in diction, with but seldom a grain of 

1 Herrick, neglected from Iiis own day till the end of the last century, has 
been repeatedly reprinted in the present. The latest editions are those by Mr, 
I'ollard in " The Muses' Library " (2 vols. London, 1891) and by the present writer 
in the " Aldine Poets" (2 vols. London, 1893). 



CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 419 

real wit to keep them tolerably sweet ; Divine Poems of wonderful 
beauty at their best, which best is expressed by the " Litany to the 
Holy Spirit " and '' The White Island " ; and lastly, an immense 
residue of secular poems, amatory, descriptive, occasional in the 
widest possible sense. 

It is on these last that the fame of Herrick really rests, and it is 
securely based. The Julia of the universally known " Night Piece " 

— " And when I meet. Thy silvery feet, My soul Til pour into thee " — 
is only one of a group of perhaps real, perhaps imaginary, mistresses 

— Althea, Electra, Perilla, Dianeme, and others — to whom the most 
exquisitely phrased love-poems are devoted ; the country sports and 
scenes (though he despised them), such as the " hock-cart," the maying, 
and the like, find the same celebration ; his maid Patience, his bread- 
bin, the daifodils, violets, primroses, cherry-blossoms, the very grass 
itself, find in him a singer, and he can be more ambitious and ab- 
stracted, as in the " Mad Maid's Song " and other things. But the 
subject of Herrick's verse never matters very much : it is the exquisite 
quality of his phrase and his " numbers " that exalts him to a place 
all his own. This quality beggars definition, and is perhaps the 
greatest justification in English literature of the " theory of the single 
word " — that one special word is the right thing in the right literary 
place, and that if you do not get it "all's spent, nought's had." No 
one has ever been quite certain what the word " Protestant " means 
in the celebrated verse beginning, " Bid* me to live and I will live, 
Thy Protestant to be " ; yet every one who knows poetry feels that 
" Protestant " could not be changed for any other word without loss ; 
and this is only an extreme and obvious case. In all his famous 
things, which a hundred anthologies have made known, and in others 
less divulged, this absolute and unerring perfection of word-selection 
appears. The thoughts are sometimes trivial, sometimes not; but 
the expression gives them at once the freshness of the morning dew 
and the perennial character of marble. Herrick's images are not as a 
rule out of the way ; his mere vocabulary is, for his time and class, 
quite ordinary for the most part. But the choice and the collocation 
make it something absolutely unique. 

The art of Thomas Carew,^ narrower in range, much more spar- 
ingly exemplified, and more artificial in appearance, is of much the 
same kind. Many details of his life are problematical, but he was 
certainly of a Gloucestershire or Worcestershire branch 
of the great western family of Carew or Carey, was per- 
haps born in Kent, perhaps went to Westminster School, and perhaps 

1 Ed. Ebsworth, London, 1893. Like most of the poets in this chapter, 
Ilerrick and Vaughan being the main exceptions, Carew is in the great collections 
of Anderson and Chalmers. 



420 CAROLINE LITERATURE uooK vii 

thence to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The University though 
not the College is certain, as also that he was known to most of the 
wits, especially the Oxford set of Falkland and Hyde, that he was 
Sewer (marshal of the dishes) to Charles L, that he was a "son" 
of Ben's. He died in or about 1638. Most other things about 
him are guesswork, but it is the merest uncritical partisanship 
to neglect or slight the testimony of his admiring friend Clarendon, 
that his life had been somewhat licentious, though his death was 
the death of the penitent. A masque of his, Ca'lnin Britanni- 
ctiiii, which is not unworthy to be ranked with Ben's all but best, 
had been published in 1634; but Carew's Poeins appeared posthu- 
mously^ in 1640, and they did not include divers paraphrases of 
Psalms which are of no great value — a sentence which extends to 
divers attributed poems, fished out from MSS. or other sources by 
recent diligence. The volume of 1640, small as it is, still contains his 
titles to fame. 

This volume is small, and the contemporary malevolence or jest 
which attributed " hide-boundness " to Carevv's muse was not subject 
to any such complete contradiction as Johnson's characterisation of 
Fielding as a " barren rascal." But the titles are indisputable. The 
best, — the "Persuasions to Love," to A. L., — with its at first play- 
ful octosyllables rising to a panting throb of passion seldom equalled ; 
the song, characteristic of Caroline triumph in such things, " Give 
me love or more disdain "f the still more splendid "To my Incon- 
stant Mistress" — "When thou, poor excommunicate"; the indig- 
nant and manly expostulation, " I was foretold, your rebel sex " ; 
the inferior but very pretty " He that loves a rosy cheek"; the 
second " To Celia Singing " ; " Red and White Roses," with two or 
three other things the pattern-piece of the author ; the audacious but 
also admirable " Rapture " ; the beautiful group of epitaphs on Lady 
Mary Villers ; the stately elegy on Donne, so generous and yet so 
just ; and, to finish with what all admit, the splendid " Ask me no 
more" — these things by no means exhaust, but put at perhaps their 
very best, Carew's titles to high honour as an English poet. His 
consummate elegance has no doubt done him harm with some judges, 
according to the prejudice put in the wtll-known verses of his " father" 
Ben — 

Still to l)e neat, still to be drest, 

and so forth. But the " Rapture," the Donne Elegy, and the " A. L." 
verses are there to give evidence of intensity, of real passion on his 
part, which at once negatives the suspicion. And if we meditate a 
little on such a piece as " Red and White Roses," it will be very 
hard to refuse its author a place, apart it may be from the greater 



CHAP. II THE METAPIIYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 421 

summits of poetry and lower than they are, but untouched, unapproached, 
by any peak in its own Icind. Here, as in those best pieces of 
Herrick which have been noticed above, there is an absohite and final 
felicity in the style. 

The poets of this Caroline age are so numerous, they are so 
attractive, and their attractions consist so much in little separate 
bits and strokes, that there is danger, more than in almost any 
other of our compartments, of being seduced into prolixity dis- 
proportionate for such a survey as this ; and we must quicken the 
pace with a large group of singers. The order in which they are 
mentioned, though a certain rough chronological arrangement may 
be observed, is not very material. The lyric touch, which is the 
strong point of nearly all, distinguishes, with only slight changes, 
alike men who died before Milton left for Italy, such as Randolph, 
and men who saw the eighteenth century, such as Sedley. 

Thomas Randolph,^ who will be mentioned again for his plays, 
was born in 1605, of a gentle family. He went to Westminster 
School and was of both Universities, belonging more originally to 
Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Trinity. He died 
when he was only thirty. He is accused of rather free a" o p • 
living, but this sort of vague and stock censure of poets goes for 
little, and certain elegiac verses by his brother Robert, a student of 
Christ Church, who outlived him many years, have a more genuine 
ring in their eulogy than is usual in such things. Randolph''s non- 
dramatic verse, though not very copious, is fresh, vigorous, and dis- 
tinctly original. It is, especially in the couplet pieces, of the older 
cast of his time, and in stanza or octosyllable, rather Jacobean than 
Caroline. His best piece, perhaps, is the '• Ode to Master Anthony 
Stafford to hasten him into the country," a thing somewhat in Ben's 
style. 

William Habington - was born in the same year with Ran- 
dolph, at Hindlip Hall, Worcestershire. He was a Roman Catholic, 
and so did not go to either University, but lived as a country gentle- 
man, marrying Lady Lucy Herbert, and dying in 1654. 
He left one play. The Qiieeti of Aj-ragoit, and a collection ^ '"S on- 
of poems, the bulk of which celebrates the charms and virtues of his wife 
under the title-name of Castara. Friendship as well as love inspired 
him, and he wrote many verses on the death of his comrade, George 
Talbot, with a few miscellanies. Habington is creditably distin- 
guished from too many of his contemporaries by a very strict and 
remarkable decency of thought and language, and he has some very 
fine passages. On the whole, however, he ranks rather with Herbert 

1 Ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 2 vols. London, 1875. 

- Ed. Arber, and in the collection of Ciialmers. 



422 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

as a poet of few faults — he has not even the excess of Herbert's 
quaintness — than with Crashaw as one of magnificent bursts, or with 
Herrick as one of constantly exquisite felicities. 

William Cartwright ^ was born about five years after Randolph, in 

1610, and died two years before Habington, in 1643, but the date 

and place of his birth are disputed. He certainly spent more than 

. , half of his short life at Oxford, where he died durinor the 

Cartwright. , - r i i i i ■ ■.-,■. ^ 

war, and five years after he had taken orders. He left 
plays, too, and poems, the latter fairly numerous, but mostly short 
and always occasional. His couplets, like Randolph's, show little of 
the new form and pressure ; but his lyric verses, again of the Jonson 
tribe, are often good, and sometimes excellent. The more extrava- 
gant side of the school is shown in the lines on '' A Gentlewoman's 
Silk Hood," the better in the lines ''To Chloe," to Bishop Duppa, 
and others. 

Richard Corbet,^ Bishop of Oxford, and then, just before Hall, of 
Norwich, was a much older man than those just mentioned, having 
been born in 1582; but he did not attain to his chief distinctions till 

^ , a few years before his death, which happened in the 

Corbet. ^ t. i , i , tt i . i 

same year as Randolph s. He too was closely connected 
with Ben. and is said to have procured him his degree from Oxford. 
He -appeals to have been an interesting compound of a sound divine 
and a good fellow, and his poetical pieces, which are quite occasional, 
were probably spread over the greater part of his not very long fife, 
though many of them date from the latter part of it. The best and 
most poetical, a charming address to his little son Vincent, combining 
humour and tenderness in the best English fashion, certainly does so, 
having been written in 1630. At purely serious poetry Corbet was 
not very great, but in lighter and satiric verse he anticipates Butler, 
Swift, and even Prior, as in his //er Borcak (a title copied after- 
wards), his Join-ney into Fratice, and (the strongest and bitterest of 
all) his " Exhortation to Mr. John Hammond " and " Distracted 
Puritan." Moreover, he has a charming piece on Fairies. 

There is a certain traditional and now inseparable bond between 
Lovelace and Suckling. Both were unlucky Cavaliers, both illustrate 
the poignant charm of Cavalier poetry at its best, and both, it must 

be added, illustrate also the slipshod faults of this poetry 
'"^' at its worst. Both, moreover, give us, better than any 
others, the link of transition from the first to the second lyrical Caro- 
line School, from Herrick and Carew to Dorset and Sedley. The 
short life of Sir John Suckling ^ is partly mythical. He was of a 
good though not great family, was educated at Westminster perhaps, 

1 Chalmeis, vol. vi. - See Chalmers. 

3 Ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 2 vols. London, 1874. 



CHAP. 11 THE METAniYSICALS AND LYRIC TOETS 423 

and Trinity College, Cambridge, certainly became early master of a 
great fortune, lavished it in travel, in court frivolities, and (at the 
breaking out of the war with Scotland) in equipping a troop of horse 
who did no credit to themselves and their leader, was a strong 
Royalist in the Long Parliament, and had to fly to the Continent, 
was perhaps a victim of the Inquisition in Spain, and perhaps 
poisoned himself at Paris in 1642. Suckling's excess of wealth over 
birth, and perhaps his careless living, seem to have excited some ill- 
feeling against him, but there is little solid proof that he was a 
cowardly prodigal and fribble, and we should certainly prefer not to 
think the author of the " Ballad on a Wedding " anything of the 
kind. Besides that charming piece and his plays (see as in other 
cases post), with some letters, etc., he has left a parcel of poems, 
occasional, satirical (his Session of the Poets, which not improbably 
earned him his bad reputation, was constantly imitated), and above 
all amatory, of a curious and original kind, indicated at once in the 
words — 

There never yet was honest man 
Who ever drove the trade of love, 

upon which text the poets and play-writers dwelt with unwearying 
iteration for the next half-century and more. Suckling, however, 
though neither a refined nor a very passionate writer, does not reach 
the dull brutality of loveless commerce which disgraces the worst 
writers of the next age and too often taints the best. His is the real 
" elfin laughter," the true tricksiness of Cupid, which even Rochester, 
even Congreve, turned to sordid treachery and ribald coarseness 
later. Everything with Suckling turns to a ripple of merriment. 
'• Love's World" reads like, and perhaps is, a designed burlesque of the 
metaphysical altitudes. 

'Tis now since I sat down before 
That foolish fort, a heart, 

is the very triumph of the style, unless 

Out upon it ! I have loved 
Three whole days together; 

or the universally known 

Why so thin and pale, fond lover? 

demand the preference. The poet is not always quite so frivolous ; 
there are poems, and good ones, of his which might pass muster as 
serious, but one always suspects that they are not. 



424 CAROLINE LIIEKATURK book vii 

Richard Lovelace ' derives his just immortality from two or three 
pieces of exactly the opposite kind. He was of a better family than 
Suckling, but like him very wealthy, being the heir to 
great estates in Kent. He was born at Woolwich in 
1618, educated at Charterhouse and at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, was 
prevented from taking part in the Civil War by being committed to 
the Gatehouse and held to enormous bail in 1642, but contrived to help 
the King's cause with much money, fought abroad at Dunkirk and 
elsewhere, and returning to England in 1648, was again imprisoned. 
He was released, but as a ruined man, and he died in Gunpowder 
Alley, Shoe Lane, two years before the Restoration. Meanwhile his 
beloved Lucy Sacheverall — "Lucasta" — had married another under 
the belief that he was dead, and Lovelace, one of the handsomest 
men of his time, beloved by all, rich, well-born, and of rare abilities, 
died thus almost miserriinits. He published Lucasta in 1649, ^"^^ 
ten years later a brother added Postliumoiis Poems. He wrote plays, 
but they perished. The greater part of his work is worthless, and 
some of it almost unintelligible, owing to the strange decay which 
came on verse about this time, and to very careless printing. But *' On 
Going to the Wars " and " To Althea from Prison " defy the greatest 
things of the greatest poets in absolute achievement of their particular 
purpose, and there are charming passages in "The Grasshopper." 

From these two mainly, and especially from Suckling, proceed 
a school of songsters who, as has been said, did not absolutely cease 
till tlie death of Sedley in the year after that of Uryden. Dryden 
himself has some claims to belong to them, but there is still a differ- 
ence of cast, hard to define but easy to perceive, and all his work 
had best be handled in the next period. Marvell, at his best almost 
the equal of any in this chapter, Davenant, and that remarkable 
isolation. Chamberlayne, may be placed apart. For our purposes 
the group may be composed, again in loosely chronological order, of 
Sherburne, Bishop King, .Stanley, Godolphin, Bronie, and Cotton 
among the school more especially of Charles L Rochester, Dorset, 
Sedley, and Mrs. Behn, the more definitely Restoration group, can 
be postponed. To these a fringe or fringes might be added very 
copiously, for the second and third quarters of the seventeenth 
century swarmed with poets and poetasters. 

Of these last may be mentioned John Cleveland, who was born 
at Hinckley in 1613, became a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, 
took refuge at Oxford with other Cambridge Cavaliers, was imprisoned 
under the Commonwealth, and died of fever in 1658. Cleveland is 
rather unfairl}' known by some citations of conceits in Johnson's dis- 

1 lid. W. C. Hazlitt, London, 1864. 



CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 425 

quisition on the metaphysicals prefixed to his Life of Cowley, and he 
has not recently been reprinted. Even Dryden soon after the Restora- 
tion sneers at him ; and his name became a byword for 
extravagances of style. He had, however, no little vigour, and others, 
chiefly shown in his "State" Poems, the longest of which 
is a flirious onslaught on the Scots for their betrayal of Charles. It 
is at least curious to compare his elegy on Edward King with Lycidas, 
and in his outrageous debauch of figure and fancy we may charitably 
allow a suspicion of humorous and conscious exaggeration. Wild, 
author of a second Iter Borcale and tlie sharer of Dryden's sarcasm, 
was a very inferior Cleveland who survived the Restoration ; Flatman, 
a poet and painter with an unlucky name who wrote some charming 
songs, and whom Pope found "good to steal from." Flecknoe, 
notorious for Dryden's unceremonious use of his name in his satire 
on Shadwell, has a fine poem on " Silence " and some other good 
things. Patrick Carey's Trivial Poems and Triolets (1651) are 
pleasant for more than their form and the fact that Scott re-edited 
them. But of these, as still more of Beedome and Baron, Hall and 
Heath and Hooke, Tatham and Kynaston, Prestwich and Shepherd, 
no account in any detail can be given here.^ 

The life of Andrew Marvell - and his work both fall into two 
sharply divided and curiously contrasted sections. In the first he is ( 
a quiet student, a passionate lyrical poet of love and nature, and if ) 
of Puritan leanings and .surroundings, gently inchned to 

ft ' to ./ Marvell 

what is noble in the other side ; in the second he is, 
perhaps an austere patriot, certainly a violent politician, and poetically 
a ferocious lampooner in rough couplets. We may confine our- 
selves here to his earlier, and as literature better, period. He 
was born in 1621 at Winestead, not far from Hull, and went early 
to Cambridge, where he took his Bachelor's but not his Master's 
degree. He seems to have travelled a good deal, but we find him 
in 1649 at home, contributing to the collection of elegies on Lord 
Hastings which saw Dryden's first work, and being the friend of 
Richard Lovelace. Indeed, the splendid lines on the execution of 
Charles I., and others, show him as at least partly Royalist at this 
time. In 1650, however, Fairfax made him his daughter's tutor, 
and for this reason or that Marvell seems to have changed his 
poHtics. He was long resident with his young pupil at Nun Appleton, 
in Yorkshire, and wrote there much of his most delightful verse. 

1 For Cleveland I use Cleveland's Genuine Poems, 1677 ; for Wild, the edition 
of 1671 ; for Flatman, the third edition, 1682. These and the rest have been cruelly 
extruded from Mr. VV^ard's Poets, but Specimens of most, if not all, may be found 
in Ellis, vol. iii., and Campbell, vol. iv., as well as in Mr. BuUen's privately 
printed Speculum Amantis and Afiisa Proterva. 

2 Ed. Aitken, 2 vols. London, 1892. 



426 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

Becoming an admirer of Cromwell and a friend of IMilton, he entered 
Parliament even before the Restoration, and sat for Hull till his 
death in 1678. For some years he was abroad doing diplomatic 
work, but latterly he fell more and more into Opposition. 

His best, and indeed his only really, poetical work was done 
before he had reached middle life, and exhibits, with a form individual 
and in a type more chastened and classical, the best characteristics of 
the Cavalier poets. The exquisite octosyllables of the long poem on 
" Appleton House," and the shorter and still better known ones on 
" The Bermudas " and " The Nymph regretting the loss of her 
Fawn," unite Jonson's art with Herrick's grace. "The Coronet," in 
style between Crashaw and Vaughan, is free from the rococo 
ornament of the first and the tongue-tied inequality of the second ; the 
passionate magnificence of the Amorists, whom Milton so tastelessly 
scorned, has no nobler examples than "To his Coy Mistress," and 
still more " The Definition of Love," with its splendid beginning — 

My love is of a birth as rare 

As 'tis for object, strange and high — 

It was begotten of Despair 
Upon Impossibility ; 

and the majesty in style of the " Horatian Ode " (to Cromwell, but 
containing the lines on his victim) is among the noblest and most 
individual of the kind in English. Nor can it be said that Marvell, 
like most of his school and time, wrote unequally ; so that it is only 
curious that he did not write more. But perhaps it is not fanciful to 
argue that the peculiar and indeed unique perfection of phrase charac- 
terising the best poetry of this period involved a kind of mental effort 
of gestation which could not be repeated very often, and which obliged 
the poet to be either unequal or else infertile. 

Henry King,^ a typical poet of this period (who is likely to keep 
his place in English literature by at least one exquisite piece of love- 
verse, " Tell me no more how fair she is," and by a part claim to 
" Like to the falling of a star," one of those sets of 

op ing. ^,gj.ggg which so caught the fancy of the time that they 
exist in many different forms and are attributed as originally the work 
of more than two different men), was born at Worminghall in Bucks 
in 1592, was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, received 
preferment early (his father was Bishop of London), but justified it 
both by abilities and virtues, was the friend of Jonson, Donne, whose 
executor he was, and Howell the epistoler, became Canon of Christ- 
church, Dean of Winchester, and Bishop of Chichester, was much 
despoiled and ill-treated during the Rebellion, but recovered his see 
1 Ed. (incompletely) by Rev. J. Hannah, O.xford and London, 1843. 



CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 427 

at the Restoration, and died in 1669. His poems were partly 
published in 1657. The influence of his great friend Donne is 
obvious, and though King had not anything like Donne's strength 
or the strangeness of his charm, yet " Tell me no more how fair she 
is" is perfect in its kind. 

Of the five Cavalier poets ^ mentioned together above, most were 
actively engaged in the war, or at least active members of the 
Royalist party. Edward Sherburne, afterwards knighted, and the 
son of a knight of the same name, was born in London 
in 1 61 8, was educated abroad (he was a Roman Catholic), gJ^Jom"'^' 
and became clerk of the Ordnance, but lost his place Stanley, ' 
and his liberty in 1642. On his release he joined the Brome! 
King's army, but chiefly studied at Oxford till the 
triumph of the Parliament, when he lost all his property. He 
recovered his Ordnance post at the Restoration, but lost it as a 
Roman Catholic at the Revolution, and did not die till 1702. Much 
of his not extensive poetical work is translated from authors and 
languages ancient and modern. His originals, reminding us of 
Carew on the profane side, of Crashaw on the sacred, have sufficient 
charm of their own, yet perhaps never show quite at the best of 
_Jjie style. Thomas Stanley, a cousin of Sherburne's, has kept 
remembrance better as the author of the first English History of 
Philosophy, and as the editor of an excellent edition of Aeschylus, 
than as a poet, but, as was not uncommon at the time, great and 
genuine learning by no means extinguished poetry in him. He was 
the son of a rich man, and though a strong Royalist, does not seem 
to have been much incommoded. He was born in 1624, educated 
at Pembroke College, Oxford, and died in 1678, having lived chiefly 
in the Temple. He sang mainly of love, and well. Another of 
the group, Sidney Godolphin, uncle of the future Lord Treasure)-, 
and himself celebrated by Clarendon, had the good fortune to die 
young and gloriously fighting in Hopton's triumphant campaign at 
Chagford in 1642. He was not much over thirty at his death, having 
been born in 1610. He had entered Exeter College, Oxford, at 
fourteen, and with Trevanion, Slanning, and Sir Bevil Grenvil, was the 
flower of the Cavaliers of the West. He, like his friends, was both 
translator and original writer, and though his work is not great in bulk, 
he has the ineffable ring of the time in many more places than this : — 

Oh love me less or love me more, 

And play not with my liberty; 
Either take all or all restore, 

Bind me at least, or set me free. 

1 Sherburne, Cotton, and Brome are in Chalmers. 



428 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

Brome and Cotton were of somewhat less limited production, but 
also of a less rare style. Alexander Brome (to be distinguislied 
from Richard, the playwright, whose plays he edited) was a Londoner 
and an attorney. He was born in 1620 and died in 1666. It does 
not appear that he took any active part for the King, but very 
many of the songs and lampoons by which the Cavaliers kept up 
their spirits between Rebellion and Restoration are attributed to 
him ; he has Izaak Walton's good word, which could have been given 
to no bad man ; and some of his light and careless ditties have the 
true vein of jovial and not ignoble song. If he is sometimes coarse, he 
stopped far short of the unpleasant excesses of others in that direction, 
and tliere is tenderness in his love-poems, fire in his Bacchanalia, 
sincerity in his political songs, and wit, whim, and spirit every\v'here. 
Charles Cotton of Beresford Hall, Staffordshire, is known to most 
people as Walton's colleague and pupil in the Complete Angler ; to 
some as the author of the admirable " New Year Poem," admired by 
Lamb ; to a few as the writer of many other pleasant verses, including 
the last rondeaitx that English saw for a century ; and to fewer 
still, it may be hoped, by the unworthy following of Scarron and 
Butler combined, called Virgil Travestie. As a prose writer he 
is kept in some memory by his translation of Montaigne, though 
it was not in the least wanted after Florio. . His original poems, very 
numerous, very unequal, and often very slight, are sometimes at least 
very happy. 

Hardly one of the authors as yet mentioned in this chapter was 
voluminous ; we must now turn to those of their time who were. 
Butler, though really of it, is so mixed up with the history of Restoration 

Ouarles literature that he may be postponed, Davenant, Quarles, 
More, ' Chamberlayne, More, and Beaumont must find place. 

eaumont. Yqwx of these Writers, very popular in their time, are 
now merely curiosities, the fifth has never been mucli known, but 
was a writer of singular talent. The most voluminous of all was 
Francis Quarles,^ who was born of a good Essex family near 
Romford, in 1592, was a member of Christ's College, Cambridge, 
and of Lincoln's Inn, and held divers appointments in court, city, 
and the lay offices of the Church. He just survived the breaking 
out of the Rebellion, and died in 1644. His work is enormous: he 
would versify anything from the Arcadia to the Lamentations. 
Little of his is now remembered except his famous Emblems; and 
he wrote prose, of which again nothing survives in the general 
memory but the Enchiridion. There are good things in Quarles ; 
but it requires a great deal of leisure to find them out, and they are 

1 Quarles is reprinted in three, Beaumont in two, and More in one, of the 
qiiaito volumes of Dr. Grosart's privately printed " Chertsey Worthies' Library." 



CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 429 

so fragmentary as hardly to be capable of separate representation. 
Henry More and Joseph Beaumont carried the dubious Spenserianism 
of the Fletchers yet farther by writing immense poems on philosophical 
theology. More's enormous Song of the Soul in Spenserians, and 
even Beaumont's more enormous Psyche in sixains, are not to be 
spoken of without respect, the first being certainly the work of a man 
who had poetry in him. But the choice of subject in each case was 
problematical, the choice of scale in both fatal. 

The middle of the century saw two other long poems of much 
more human interest. Both were the work of ardent Cavaliers ; both 
deserted alike the classical epic and the allegorical romance for a 
novel kind of story founded, no duobt, in each case (though the fact 
has not been always recognised) on the French heroic novel, but 
treated with independence. One, however, distinctly anticipated the 
change of taste which was coming, and was, either for that reason or 
because of its author's busy and not unamiable character, immediately, 
widely, and for some time popular. The other, except in scheme and 
subject, looked backward, and seems to have been almost entirely 
neglected. These are the Goiidibert of Sir William Davenant and 
the PJiaromiida of William Chamberlayne. 

Davenant 1 was born at Oxford in 1605, the son of an innkeeper, 
but had some connection with Shakespeare, wrote verses (and not 
bad ones) on his death, and was well educated at Lincoln College. 
He was taken up by Lord Brooke and others, and 
produced his tragedy of Alboviiie in 1628, when most 
of the second school of Elizabethans, and some, of the first, were 
still living and writing. Ten years later he succeeded Jonson as 
Laureate, became a playhouse manager, and both in these capacities 
and as a busy servant of the King, and still worse of the Queen, fell 
into very bad odour with the Puritan party. He served, was capt- 
ured, and thrown into prison. He even seems to have been in 
some serious danger, but is said to have been saved by Milton, 
whose kindness he afterwards returned in the time of the greater 
poet's own peril. If the stories are true, he thus knew the three 
greatest men of letters (for he was later intimate with Drydert) of the 
three generations of the century ; and he was in more ways than one 
an ingenious and interesting man of letters. 

He was not, however, a great poet, though his miscellaneous verse 
is sometimes pretty, and Gondibert is not a great poem. It was 
written on principle, and is ushered not by the usual crowd of com- 
mendatory verses from anybody and nobody, but by two copies 
only, from the great Mr. Cowley and the great Mr. Waller, and by 
letters to and from Mr. Hobbes. To this last Davenant explains his 
"^ Gondibert, with Davenant's other poems, is to be found in Chalmers. 



430 CAROLINE LITERATURE UooK vil 

principles at great length, and Hobljes replies that he never yet saw 
poem that had so much shape of art, health of morality, beauty of 
expression, as this Goiidiberi (which was not finished). It is a poem 
in three books, each of several cantos, and some 1700 or 1800 
quatrains — a form which for some time marked, and very slightly 
arrested, the inevitable transition from the longer stanzas to couplet 
and blank verse. The scene is Lombardy. and esjjecially Verona ; 
the theme the affections of the hero as tending towards Rhodalind 
or towards Birtha, two damsels equally " bright of blee " with fighting 
and other things. But the stanza is not well suited for narratives of 
great length, and the verse, though occasionally weighty and dignified, 
is too often wooden ; while, except in Birtha, there is little attempt at 
character. 

PJiaronnida ^ is a very much better thing, though by no means a 

perfect one. Of its author little is known. He was born about 

1620, practised as a physician, and died in 1689, at Shaftesbury 

Chamber- iti Dorsetshire. He was a good Cavalier and fought at 

layne. ^he battle of Newbury. He tells us himself that he 
had few literary friends. Besides P/iaronm'da (published in 1659, 
and in its author's lifetime turned into a prose romance under the 
title of Eromcna), he had a year earlier published a play, Love's 
Victories, which seems to have been acted twenty years after, also 
with its title changed. It is a somewhat confused piece (see next 
chapter) of the Brome and Nabbes kind, more poetical, with some 
very fine flashes, but not worth much as a whole. 

PJiaronnida, on the contrary, is worth a great deal, though as far 
as possible from being faultless. It is difficult to agree with Camp- 
bell (the first of the few who have praised it) that it is "one of the 
most interesting stories ever told in verse," for this story, such as it 
is, is extremely incoherent, and the personages are mere stock 
romantic types— Pharonnida, a virgin in danger; her lover Argalia, 
a compound of Joseph, Amadis, and Hector; and .so forth. Further, 
the ugly colloquialisms which were then invading both verse and 
prose — especially that ugliest " to's " for " to his," and the like — 
deface it. But the versification, which represents a further develop- 
ment from Wither and Browne, is, though too much "enjambed," 
often charmingly melodious ; some of the episodes — especially that 
at Rhodes, with the fate of Janusa, which Campbell has given, not 
quite completely — are of great force and interest, and above all the 
spirit of romance pervades the whole, while the separate phrases and 
passages of beauty are literally innumerable. It has five books, each 
in several cantos like Gondibcrt, and must contain from twelve to 
fifteen thousand verses. But it is not rash to say that of- the nearly 
1 3 vols. {Love's Victories is in the third) London, 1820. 



CHAP. 11 THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 431 

five hundred jjages which contain them hardly one can be read with- 
out finding some notable poetic fragment, and few without finding 
more than one such tiling as we may search the whole poetry of the 
eighteenth century with little chance of paralleling. 

The Miscellanies and Song-books of the Elizabethan period proper 
continued, through its Jacobean and Caroline appendices, in slightly 
changed fashions, which must be at least glanced at here. The 
books of this class may be best divided into two varieties 
which often crossed each other. The ballad,^ the rise • 
of which was sketched formerly, received especial attention during the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and certain individual fashioners 
of it, Thomas Delony, Elderton, Martin Parker, are known. The 
bulk of the examples preserved for us by the fortunate fancies of 
Pepys and other collectors is enormous, and from time to time 
bundles were printed under divers titles, some of them very pretty,- in 
which the word Garland is often conspicuous. But there were also 
more literary collections,^ in which not a little of the work of poets 
mentioned already occurs, with a good deal that is anonymous, this 
latter sometimes including charming things such as the famous 
"Phillida (Phillada) flouts me." At about the time of the Restora- 
tion these books were apt to assume the title of Drollery, which per- 
severed for a good many years, till Dryden stamped Miscellany with 
his seal. To judge the progress of literature one must read most of 
these things ; but the result of the reading is not easy to summarise. 
As the century went on, the coarseness (sometimes reaching brutality) 
which was provoked and fostered by Puritanism stains them. Yet 
even in the dullest and most offensive deserts, things like 

And the Star Chamber of her eyes 
Robs subjects of their liberties, 

make diversion and amends. 

1 The labours of the Ballad Society, with the more especial help of Mr. Chap- 
pell, Dr. Furnivall, and Mr. Ebsworth, have laid these pretty well at our disposal. 

2 There can hardly, for instance, be a prettier than The Crown Garland of 
Golden Roses, compiled by R. Johnson (Percy Society, 1842-45). The contents 
only sometimes correspond. 

3 Mnsarum Deliciae, Wit Restored, Wit's Recreations, the Rump Poems (re- 
printed, London, ti.d., 4 vols.), and the Covent Garden, Westminster, and Cioicc 
Drolleries (ed. Ebsworth, 3 vols. Boston, v.d.) may stand as examples, being those 
which the writer knows best. 



CHAPTER III 

THE DKAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES 

Massinger — Ford — Shirley — Randolph — Suckling — Davenant — Brome — 
Nabbes and Davenport — Glapthorne 

With due observation of the caution (which may seem tecHously 
repeated, but is still necessary) as to the overlapping of periods in 
the brief, crowded, and intensely active years of the drama called 
Elizabethan, we shall find a more than sufficiently well-marked 
character in its third and last stage, though the best men — Massinger, 
Ford, Shirley — were not very young. 

Philip Massinger,! son of a gentleman-dependant of the Pembroke 

family, was born in 1583, went to St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, and 

seems to have remained at the University till about the usual age of 

five or six and twenty. We do not know how or when 

Massinger. , i i • t i i i i 

he made his way to London and began play-writnig, 
tnough he was, on documentary evidence, engaged in that occupation 
as early as 1614; but the earliest thing of his that we have is The 
Virgin Martyr, which was acted in 1622. He died seventeen years 
later, in 1639, and was buried in St. Saviour's, Southwark, a church 
of many literary connections. It was not that of his own parish, for 
he was entered as "a stranger." Thus he is nearly as little known 
to us personally as his colleague in 77/1? Virgin Martyr, Dckker 
himself. 

But in his literary character we know him very well. Of nearly 
twoscore plays recorded and ascribed to him, rather more than 
half are lost, but the eighteen that remain ^ exhibit him in suffi- 
ciently varied lights, and the total judgment of him would probabfy 
not be much altered if we had the rest. The general impression 
which he gives, when he is compared with his predecessors, is that of 

1 Works, ed. Gifford, with those of Ford and an Introduction by Hartley Cole- 
ridge ("new edition," London, 1859). 

2 With Sir John Van Olden Darncveldt {Old Plays, ed. A. H. Bullcn, vol. ii.) 
as a not improljable addition, though there is no evidence of authorship, 

432 



CH. Ill THE DRAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES 433 

a slight increase of artificiality accompanied by — and no doubt due 
to — a corresponding decrease in original and spontaneous genius. 
Massinger's tragedies are never the mere blood-and-thunder muddles 
of which we have so many before him, and they have many noble 
scenes and passages, especially in Tlie Uimatm-al Co/nbat, Tlie Duke 
of Milan, The Bondman, T/ie Picture, The Roman Actor, The Fatal 
Doivry ; but with the exception of The Virgin Maj-tyr itself, where the 
difference is fairly set down to the hand of Dekker, we find little or 
nothing of the ineffable snatches of poetry of the earlier drama, and 
an inability to strike out those fresh and not impossible, if not 
always very probable, types of character which (not to mention 
Shakespeare) we find even in Beaumont and Fletcher. So also his 
comedies never quite descend to the level of those mere heaps of less 
or more amusing scenes compacted into no dramatic story, and not 
even connected by the thread of any one vivid character, which we 
find earlier in Middleton, and later in Brome, and Nabbes, and 
others of his younger contemporaries. But hardly more than twice, 
in the famous New Way to Pay Old Debts (by far his greatest play, 
in which the usurer and tyrant Sir Giles Overreach is worthy of 
Jonson at least) and in The City Madam, does he rise to distinction 
in comedy. On the whole, however, the greatest of the great race 
cease with him, for he as far surpasses Shirley in intensity and in the 
goodness of his best things, as he does Ford — his superior in these 
points — in range, bulk, variety, and comparative freedom from the 
morbid. His blank verse is very good, less musical than Beaumont 
and Fletcher's, but free from that perilous pressing of the "points" 
which is observable in the later work of the survivor of them, admir- 
ably suited for stately declamation, and yet of sufficient variety. 
And he has a certain indefinable faculty of giving a good account of 
almost any subject handled by him. That he has had few passionate 
admirers is due probably to the fact that he rather attains and keeps 
a high level of general craftsmanship than shoots to solitary heights 
of individual artistic success. But, since Gifford, he has been generally 
set too low, and Gifford did not value him quite aright. 

He should indeed gain, not lose, by the contrast with his con- 
temporary, John Ford.^ Ford does go higher than Massinger; 
he has i-eceived warmer praise by far ; it is considered as a mark of 
Philistinism to set any limitation to estimates of him. 
Yet it is noticeable that wherever Ford is at his best, he 
avails himself of illegitimate aids. His very best play, ""Tis Pity she's 
a Jf'hore, brings on the scene the passion of a brother for a sister, and 
his next best, The Broken Heart, piles up the agony by the most pre- 
posterous and improbable means. Ford cannot do with nature ; he 

1 Ed. Gifford and Hartley Coleridge, as above ; also Dyce, reprinted 1895. 
2 F 



434 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

must go against or beyond her to fetch eifects of tragedy, and in 
doing this he stands condemned and exckided from tlie first order 
of poets of liis own time, or indeed of any. The inspiration of the 
unnatural is the " Dutch courage " of poetry. 

He was not, like most of his rivals, a writer for a living, though 
he seems to have worked pretty hard for those by no means lavish 
paymasters the theatrical managers. He wrote plays in the second, 
third, and fourth decades of the century ; but he was a member of a 
good Devonshire house, the Fords of Ilsington, was connected with 
others, was a member of Lincoln's Inn, though we have no record of 
his being at either University. As early as 1606 he celebrated the 
death of Lord Mountjoy, the last lover and, after a fashion, second 
husband of Sidney's Stella. When he ceased writing or when he 
died we do not know, and we have very few notices of him, the chief 
being the often-quoted one in a Drolleiy, which is not unpicturesque — 

Deep in a dump alone John Ford was got [gat], 
With folded arms and melancholy hat. 

Sixteen plays are attributed to him alone or in collaboration. We 
have lost Beauty in a Trance, destroyed by Warburton's cook, but 
entered in the Stationers' books as late as 1653. 77^1!? London 
Merchant, The Royal Comedy, and An III Beginning has a good End, 
also destroyed by this same evil cook, appeared still later in 1660, 
with apparently no collaborator in any. Ford and Dekker are re- 
sponsible for 77ie Fairy Knight and The Bristoive MercJiant (of which 
from Dekker we should have prefened the former), and Ford and 
Webster for The Mnrder of the Son npon the Mother, which from the 
authors of The Broken Heart and Tlie DiicJiess of Malfy must have 
been full of horrors indeed. We have remaining the curious play of 
TJie IVitch of Ed/nonton, in which Ford took part with Rowley, 
Dekker, and others ; The Sun's Darling, by Ford and Dekker, and 
worthy of neither except that it has some of the charming lyrics 
which Ford could never manage alone, but which mark the 
passage of Dekker everywhere. The Fancies Chaste atid Noble, 
Love's Sacrifice, The Lady's Trial are all feeble, and Love's Sacrifice 
offensive ; so that the pieces on which his fame rests are the pair 
already mentioned, with Tlie Lover's Melancholy and Perkin IVarbeck. 
This last has the perhaps not very high honour of being one of the 
best of plays on an English historical subject out of Shakespeare ; 
The Lover's Melancholy, a graceful but rather feeble piece, is prin- 
cipally famous for one of the verse transcripts (Crashaw did another) 
of Strada's prolusion on the nightingale and the lute-player. But 
neither can enter into competition with the other two, and it is by 
these that Ford's reputation stands or falls. 



CH. Ill THE DRAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES 435 

The third of the most notable poets of Charles's reign, James 
Shirley,^ was somewhat, but not very much, younger than Massinger 
and Ford. He was a Londoner, and was born in 1596 (thus vindicat- 
ing the right of the drama of which he was the last dis- 
tinguished practitioner to be called Elizabethan). He "*^" 
was educated at Merchant Taylors' and hence passed not merely to 
the natural university destination of its scholars, St. John's College, 
Oxford, but also to Catherine Hall, Cambridge. He was ordained 
in the Church of England but went over to Rome, and became a 
schoolmaster, between which occupation and the writing of plays he 
hovered for the greater part of his tolerably long life. He is said, 
as well as his wife, to have died of fright, and perhaps exposure, in 
consequence of the fire of London in 1666. 

Shirley's work, what with masques and what with plays, is very 
voluminous, extending to some forty pieces with a few non-dramatic 
poems. To the general reader he is hardly known except by the 
famous lyric, " The glories of our blood and state," contained in one 
of the latest of his entertainments. The Coiitentio7i of Ajax and 
Ulysses. Yet he was a playwri ght for some forty years, his first 
piece, Love Tricks, having" appearSri— rn 1625. Other comedies are 
The Witty Fair One (1628), The Wedding, The Ball, Hyde Park, 
The Changes, The Lady of Pleasure. Among his tragedies we may 
name The Traitor and The Cardinal; the first named of which is his 
best in this way, as The Lady of Pleasure is his best in the other. 

Shirley, almost more than any other of the great race, has suffered 
both from over-praise and over-blame, as well as from the want of 
reading as a whole, which he especially needs.- In original power 
he is undoubtedly the least of the series which he ends : he has no 
great plays, hardly any great scenes, and not very many distinguished 
passages. In him, almost for the first time, we detect a certain dis- 
tinct imitation, the " literary " note. On the other hand his plays are 
very generally readable as wholes, and have a certain gain in coherence 
and congruity, even though they, for the most part, belong to a very 
loosely constructed scheme of drama. He does not fall into the 
astonishing and almost inconceivable hodge-podge of prose that is 

1 There is still but one edition of Shirley — excellent, but rather scarce and 
rather dear — that of Gifford and Dyce, 6 vols. London, 1S33. Those who can- 
not attain to it will find six complete plays, The Witty Fair 0)ie, The Traitor, 
Hyde Park, The Lady of Pleasure, The Cardinal, and the Triumph of Peace, in a 
single volume of the "Mermaid Series," edited by Mr. Gosse (London, 1888). 
This series also contains useful selections of complete plays from nearly all the 
chief Elizabethans. 

'^ This statement is not made at random, but after a consecutive reading of 
him for the purposes of this volume. It has distinctly raised the opinions formed 
years ago on a more piecemeal acquaintance. 



436 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

not prose, and verse that is not verse, which we find in men like 
Davenant and Suckling, but can write more than fair verse when he 
chooses this, and very fair prose when he chooses that. Indeed, 
now and then his verse rises to a melancholy sweetness which ad- 
mirably suits his best notes of character and tone — notes of a rather 
feminine grace and a slightly sentimental chivalry. As in tragedy 
he stops short of horrors generally, so in comedy he abstains gener- 
ally from obscenity. After the Restoration he fell into disrepute — 
on the one hand Pepys sneers at his individual plays, and on the 
other the almost always generous Dryden takes Shirley as a type of 
dulness. But this is quite unjust, and he is even a diiect link 
between Fletcher and the distinctive Restoration comedy in all its 
better and some of its worse ways. He was undoubtedly unlucky in 
coming just where he did, and may be 'said to have fallen between 
two generations. Yet he by no means unworthily ends his own 
great class. 

Even in these three greater men — certainly in Shirley — signs, if 
not of decadence, at any rate of impending change, are manifest ; 
in nearly all the minor playwrights of the period these signs become 
* flagrant. The most promising of this group is Randolph,^ 

^ ■ whose dramatic work, Aristippus, The Conceited Pedlar, 
The Jealous Lovers, The Muses'' Lookiiig-Glass, A my id as, and Down 
ivdli Knavery, all show the influence of the classics both directly and 
through Jonson. Ainyidas and TJie Muses'' Lookiug-Glass are the 
best, but no one is absolutely good, and all labour under the defect of 
being rather exercises in different schools of drama than original 
compositions. Sir John Suckling's - plays again, to 
'"^' continue with those dramatists who were also more or 
less considerable poets, form a curious contrast to his poems. The 
versification shows almost every fault of which dramatic verse is 
caj)able, and which has been or was to be shown by English 
dramatists. It is by turns as stiff as Gorboduc and as loose as the 
worst imitations of Fletcher's later redundances, while, like play-verse 
generally at this time and for some years to come, till Dryden 
tightened things up again, it very often slips and flounders about as 
if it never could make up its mind to be verse or prose, heroics or 
doggerel. The prettily named tragedies of Brennoralt, The Sad 
One, and Aglaura (the last of which has two fifth acts, as fishing- 
rods have two tops) are strange nondescripts, blending echoes of 
Shakespeare, who was very popular at Charles the First's court, with 
imitations of the heroic novels. TJie Goblins, a comedj', is rather 
amusing but wildly chaotic. 

1 Edition as for Poems. 

'■^ Ed. Hazlitt, 2 vols. London, 1874. 



CH. Ill THE DRAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES 437 

Davenaiifs ^ verse in his plays is not much better than Suckling's, 
but, partly by accident, he is a more important person in the history 
of the stage if not of the literary drama. It has been 
said that he began as a playwright with ^/(Jt'T//;/^ (1628), 
Tlic Cruel Brother, and other things, quite early, and he followed 
them up with others — The Wits, Neivs from Plymouth, the Fair 
Favourite, The Unfortunate Lovers, Love and Honour, etc., none of 
them very good plays and all of them in very bad verse — verse so 
bad that one suspects some convention of deliberate badness, as in 
the case of the satirists. But when Davenant, long. after the theatres 
were closed, had secured his liberty through Milton, and perhaps 
also through him had become acquainted with Cromwell, he used his 
influence with the Protector to . obtain permission (1656) for the 
performance of musical entertainments, which practically restarted 
the drama itself. Notice of these will come better in the next Rook. 

The most prolific playwright, however, of this time was Richard 
Brome."^ We know next to nothing of Brome except that he was 
dead in 1653, and that at one time he was servant to Ben Jonson, 
who mentions him by no means unkindly, though others, 
to curry favour with Ben, or out of spite to Brome, spoke 
of his plays as the sweepings of Jonson's study. They are, as we 
have them edited by his namesake Alexander, fifteen in number, 
and they belong, without exception, to that rather nondescript class 
of plays of contemporary manners which has been already noted 
under the heads of Middleton, Jonson, and Fletcher. The best of 
them are The Northern Lass (in which Constance the heroine is 
made to speak a sort of Scots) and The fovial Crew, a very merry 
picture of gipsy life. All the rest, The Sparagus Garden, A Mad 
Couple well Matched, The City Wit, The Lovesick Court, The Queen 
and Concubine, The Antipodes, The Novella, The Court Beggar, The 
Damoiselle, The English Moor, Covent Garden Weeded, The New 
Exchange, resemble each other curiously. We read them without 
too much belief in their pictures of manners, and yet recognising 
traits here and there as from the life. 

Of Thomas Nabbes,^ a weaker Brome, we know even less — nothing. 
in short, except that he once drank some good strong beer at Droit- 
wich, and seems generally to have haunted Worcester- 
shire. His plays, Covent Garden, Tottenham Court ^ ^^ ^" 

'. •' Davenport. 

(names indicating the style), Hannibal and Scipio, a weak 

play of a more ambitious sort. The Bride, The Unfortunate Mother, 

^Ed. Maidment and Logan, 5 vols. Edinburgh, 1S82. 

2 Reprinteel in 3 vols. London, 1873. 

3 Nabbcs is given in two and Davenport in one of Mr. Bullen's " New Series " 
of Old Plays ; their best-known pieces are in Hazlitt's Dodslcy. 



438 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

with the moral masque of Microcosvuts, by which he has been most 
generally known, and which is perhaps his best thing — all seem 
to have been produced between 1638 and the closing of the theatres. 
Robert Davenport^ was an older writer if not an older man, for he 
had a historical play, now lost, licensed in 1624, and another, King 
John and Matilda, his best thing, has been thought to be not much 
younger, though we hear nothing of it till 1639, and it was not printed 
till still later. The City Nightcap, which ranks with it, but is a 
comedy, must have been as old in years as the histories, and there is 
a third existing play of some merit, A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, 
which was published in 1639. Davenport certainly wrote other 
plays, and those which we have are good enough to make us wish 
for what we have not. A similar wish would perhaps 
be more difficult in the case of Henry Glapthorne, of 
whom again so little is known that his editor ^ has thought it neces- 
sary to print some documents about a George Glapthorne, not known 
to be in the slightest degree connected with the dramatist. We have 
of his a certain number of poems, mostly in couplets, and in a feeble 
style, and five plays — Albertits Wallenstein (more interesting from 
its subject than from itself), Argaliis and Fartheiiia, one of the numer- 
ous dressings up of the Arcadia, Wit in a Constable, The Lady'^s 
Privilege, and TJie Hollander. Perhaps he wrote The Lady Mother. 
He is something of a poet, but very little of a dramatist. 

Besides these the fifteen years or thereabouts of Caroline drama 
provide the names of Shakerley Marmion, who besides a rather 
pretty poem, Citpid and Psyche, produced at least three extant plays, 
the best of which is TJie Antiquary, long known from its inclusion 
in Dodsley ; Sir Aston Cokain, the author of The Obstinate Lady, 
Trappolin Creduto Principe, and Ovid; Tliomas May, rival of Dave- 
nant for the Laureateship, and it is said from spite at his non-success 
afterwards a Commonwealth's man and historian of the Long Parlia- 
ment, who has left us The Heir and TJie Old Couple; Cartwright, 
whose Ordinary has merit ; and Dr. Jasper Mayne, whose City Match 
has more. All deserve respectable places in a separate history of 
the drama, and all deserve mention here.^ 

iSee note 3 on preceding page. 23 vols. London, 1874. 

3 Cokain and Marmion figure in volumes of the Edinburgh Dram a fists of 
the Restoration ; the others will be found in Hazlitt's Dods/ry. For yet other 
scattered plays of known and unknown authors during the three divisions of the 
"Elizabethan Period" which cannot find room here, I may be permitted to 
refer the more curious student to my Elizabethan Literature, pp. 423-427. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — II 

Jeremy Taylor — Fuller — South — Barrow — Baxter, Chillingworth, Hales, 
and others 

Not the least admirable and remarkable division of Caroline literature 
is that peopled by the Sermon-writers. Indeed, taking advantage of 
the facts that of Hall and Donne, the chief ornaments of the earlier 
period, one survived Charles I. himself and the other saw the first ten 
years of his reign, and that, under Charles II., another and only less 
great race arise, with a slightly different style, it has been not un- 
common to speak of the great divines in a body as Caroline. We 
shall here, as before, borrow from the Second Charles those divines 
who, under him, still exhibited the graces more specially attributable 
to English under his father, and postpone those who, like Tillotson, 
are rather eighteenth than seventeenth century in character. 

The greatest of the group thus provided are Taylor, Fuller, and 
South — the last a much younger man than the others, and a severe 
critic of them, as well as a survivor into the reign of the last Stuart 
who occupied the throne, but still distinctly Caroline and not Augustan 
in spirit; the midmost of the three, the wittiest of English divines 
except Sydney Smith, and much more of a divine than Sydney ; the 
first in almost all ways the chief of English orators on sacred subjects. 
These three display the characteristics of the time so well that a 
fairly careful survey of them will enable us to pass more rapidly over 
their fellows. 

Jeremy Taylor Mvas born at Cambridge in August 1613, and was 
the son of a barber. He was sent to Caius College, took his degrees 
there, and perhaps became Fellow, but by Laud's influence was 
transferred to Oxford, where in 1636 he became Fellow of All 
Souls. He obtained the rectory of Uppingham two years later, and 
married in 1639. ^^ is guessed rather than known to have served 

1 li'or/cs, 3 vols. London, 1844. Nofy IJv'mg and Dying &y\s\. in many separate 
forms, and The Golden Grove in some. 

439 



440 CAROLINE LITERATURE 



as chaplain in the King's army during the Rebellion, and dates are 
also very uncertain in regard to the death of his first wife, his mar- 
riage with a second, and his retirement (probably to her 
Ta^ylon property) in Wales. Here, after some time of poverty 
and school-keeping, he was patronised by the Earl of Car- 
bery, became tolerably prosperous, and during the twelve or fifteen 
years of his Welsh sojourn composed most of his greater works. 
Yet he was thrice imprisoned during this time for political and 
ecclesiastical malignancy. Even before the Restoration he received 
(rather unluckily) preferment in Ireland, being appointed by Lord 
Conway to a lectureship at Lisburn, and when the King came home 
he was made Bishop of Down, Connor, and shortly afterwards Dro- 
more, becoming also an Irish Privy Councillor and Vice-Chancellor 
of Dublin University. But he was by no means happy in Ireland, 
where, between Roman Catholics and cliiefly Presbyterian Protestants, 
his Laudian Anglicanism was very uncomfortably placed, and where 
he had domestic troubles. He died on 13th August 1667, at Lisburn, 
and was buried in his cathedral of Dromore. 

Taylor's unique position as an English churchman of letters was 
attained not by erudition (for though it would ill beseem most men 
nowadays to belittle him in this, he was for that most learned of 
times by no means extremely erudite), nor by his theological power 
(for logic was not his forte, and he more than once approached heresy 
unawares), nor in that special product of the time, casuistry, for 
which his dialectics are not delicate enough ; but wholly and solely 
by his magnificent rhetoric. This rhetoric is so tme to itself that he 
does not even show as a writer so well as he must have shown to his 
hearers, since some pretty obvious faults in the page would have 
been nearly imperceptible as they came from the pulpit, while all 
his beauties would be enhanced by actual delivery, especially as he 
is known to have had a handsome presence and an admirable elocu- 
tion. He began as a writer in 1642 with a defence of Episcopacy, 
but did not show his real quality till he was safe in Wales, under the 
wing of Lord and Lady Carbery, the latter the Lady of Comns, Alice 
Egerton. Of the numerous works then written, T/ie Liberty of Proph- 
esying is an argument for toleration which would have been more 
effective if the author had been a closer reasoner, and perhaps also if 
he had not been on the losing side at the time. 1650 saw a Life of 
Christ and the famous Holy Living, which was completed next year 
by Holy Dying. A course of Sermons for the Christian Yeai* was then 
begun, and finished in 1653. 1655 saw the devotional work called, 
from the seat of the Carberys, The Golden Grove; 1655 Uniini 
Nccessarium, a treatise on Repentance, in some points dubiously 
orthodox; and in 1660 the Duct or Diibitantium, his chief work in 



CH. IV THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — H 441 

casuistry. In all these works, as well as in his numerous others, 
the chief of which, for our purpose, is the supplement of eleven extra 
sermons to the Eniaiitos, or Christian Year, it is almost a universal 
rule that Taylor is supreme in exhortation and rhetorical description, 
great (though more unequal) in meditation, and weakest in anything 
that requires close logical argument. It may be questioned whether 
his thought is ever very profound, and it is certainly never very 
original. We are not to look in him for anything like the infinite 
suggestiveness, the far-reaching vistas, of Donne. But, luckily for 
Taylor, his subject supplied him with depth and height enough in 
mere matter, and he had nothing to supply but the external graces 
of his inimitable expression. 

Almost everything that can fairly be said against this expression 
is summed up in the one word " florid," and it seems practically 
impossible for impartial criticism to deny that this word is applicable. 
The presence of the quality it denotes shocked the younger genera- 
tion of Taylor's own time, and is commented on in a passage, not 
quite so unjust as harsh and unbecoming, by South ; it probably 
lessened Taylor's influence with the eighteenth century, and it 
certainly procured him abundant compensation at the time of the 
Romantic revolt. There can be no doubt that Taylor's flowers of 
speech are most exquisite and most lavishly provided. They hardly 
ever deserve from just criticism the epithet of tawdry. But they are 
something too lush in their growth ; they are strung with stock 
devices of phrase (" so have I seen," especially) which are irritating ; 
and their extraordinary abundance gives an air of fulsome and some- 
what feminine languor and luxuriance to the style. The less good 
effect of this is increased by Taylor's confused grammar. Like most 
of his predecessors except Hooker, he never seems quite certain 
whether he is writing Latin or English, and abuses the license of 
both languages, as well as length of sentence. Yet to no person 
of fairly catholic taste can his defects come into any close compari- 
son with his beauties. If he is seldom deep he is never shallow; his 
subjects are always noble and always worthily handled ; even his 
plainer writing has a musical cadence and a pictorial effect. If we 
want something better still we can only go to Donne or Browne, and 
Donne, at least, if not Browne, will give it us in scantier measure, 
and in manner harder to receive. 

A contrast, which is almost ♦ the full one between tragedy 
and comedy, exists between Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Fuller,^ 
who was born at Aldwinkle St. Peter's, the other division of the 

1 There is no complete edition of Fuller, but most of the books mentioned are 
obtainable in various forms, and a collection of sermons appeared (ed. Bailey and 

Axon) in 1S91. 



442 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

village in which Dryden was born later, in the summer of 1608, his 

father being rector of the parish. He was sent to Queen's College, 

Cambridge, from which he passed to Sidney Sussex, and 

Fuller. . . 

in 1630 obtained a curacy from a third college. Corpus or 
Benet. His uncle, Dr. Davenant, who had been President of Queen's, 
was now Bishop of Salisbury, and made Fuller first a prebendary of 
his cathedral and then vicar of Broadwindsor, in Dorset. He wrote 
some verse of no merit early, and produced his Holy War, a history 
of the Crusades, in 1639, and his Holy and Profane States in 1642, 
with some sermons between them. Just before the war he was made 
preacher at the Savoy, and during it was an army chaplain. But his 
moderation, or, more probably, his humour, made him thought half- 
hearted by some. He printed at Exeter in 1645, when hope was 
almost gone. Good Thoughts in Bad Times, one of his very best 
books; and followed it in 1647 with Better ThoiigiUs in Worse 
Times. Like some, though not many, sound divines and royalists, 
he was not absolutely persecuted during the usurpation, and though 
he was unable to keep a post at St. Clement's, Eastcheap. he was 
more fortunate with one at Waltham Abbey. In 1650 he published 
his Pisgah Sight of Palestine, a book on the Holy Land, in 1655 his 
great Church History of Britain, and in 1658 his Mixt Contempla- 
tion for Better Times. At the Restoration he was made D.D. and 
chaplain to the King ; and a bishopric is said to have been designed 
for him, but he died of some sort of typhus or typhoid in August 
1661. The largest and almost the most characteristic of all his 
works, the Worthies of England, was published posthumously. 

Fuller, like Taylor, was the darling of some of the great English- 
men of the Romantic revival, such as Coleridge, Southey, and Lamb. 
The last named avowedly doted on him, has made a selection of 
some of his greatest phrases, and may be said to owe his style more 
to Fuller and Browne than to any one else. At the same time, he 
has been by no means universally popular. The formidable South 
fell foul of him almost more roughly than of Taylor just after his 
death ; the eighteenth century regarded him as a learned buffoon ; 
and it is by no means certain that more modern judgments have 
been wholly conciliated to him. Nor is this surprising, for, as has 
been said, the knowledge of Fuller, except among a few students, is 
probably by no means extensive nowadays, and his temper is one not 
now commonly met, and regarded, when it occurs, either with sus- 
picion or positive dislike. Fuller's most heartfelt interests were all 
in serious things. He was probably not intensely interested in 
politics, and except that he was strongly anti-Roman, the purely 
ecclesiastical quarrels of his day did not excite any very bitter 
feelings in him ; he was a true Royalist and Anglican, but not a keen 



CH. IV THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — H 443 

one. Yet his Christianity was the very life of him ; he was an 
earnest student of history, especially in the lines of topography, 
genealogy, and heraldry. All these are of the class of subjects 
which — the world seems to take it for granted — ought to be treated 
ia what some one has called '' the grave and chaste manner." 

But it was impossible for Fuller to be grave. No mind was ever 
freer fi'om the slightest irreverence than his. But the quips and 
conceits of the Elizabethan time, the " metaphysical " fancies of the 
Jacobean, had been in some singular way seasoned in his case by an 
anticipation of the more purely satirical and jocular tone of the later 
seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, though without a trace of 
the coarseness, hardness, and impiety which too often accompanied 
this. It is absolutely impossible for Fuller to resist a jest, whether on 
natural phenomena, as where he writes of wax, '' It being yellow by 
nature is by art made red, white, and green, which I take to be the 
dearest colours, especially when appendant on parchment " ; or in 
divinity, as when he observ^es of ejaculations or short prayers, that '■ the 
soldier may at the same time shoot out his prayer to God and aim 
his pistol at his enemy, the one better hitting the mark for the other." 
This quaint quipping wit does not appeal to all readers, especially in 
modern days, and is no doubt extremely anno3'ing to some ; but they 
are probably the wisest who can enjoy it, though it is not perhaps 
necessary for them to go to the extremes of laudation indulged by 
Lamb and Coleridge. The range of Burton and the depth of Browne 
are both denied to Fuller ; his temper is a very little childish in the 
bad sense as well as childlike in the good. But if not for all tastes, 
or even for all hours, as these two are, in the case of those who love 
them, he is no mean ornament to English literature, and no scantily 
stored treasure-house of it. 

If Taylor is sometimes open to the charge of effeminacy and 
Fuller to that of childishness, neither fault can be found with Robert 
South, the most masculine of English seventeenth-century writers 
except Hobbes, and indeed a sort of orthodox pair to ^ , 

, . --T 1 .TT, • r South. 

that great writer. He was born at Hackney m 1633, 
and passed through Westminster (which certainly did not at this 
time, uncler the rule of Busby, discredit Solomon's system of educa- 
tion) to Christ Church, where he became a student in 1651. He 
took orders before the Restoration, and when that event occurred, 
was made public orator of his University, chaplain to Clarendon, 
a prebendary of Westminster, and a canon of Christ Church. He 
lived to a very great age, and, at any rate after his earliest manhood, 
was always a very strong Tory ; but he was not a nonjuror, and held 
his preferments to his death in 1716. He was a formidable contro- 
versialist, signalising himself in this way against Sherlock ; but his 



444 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

literary reputation rests upon his numerous and very remarkable 
sermons.^ He was controversial enough even in these, as may be 
seen in the passages already referred to, where he makes strictures 
on Fuller and Taylor ; and compliments have been paid to his wit 
almost equal to those bestowed upon Fuller himself. They are 
merited, always remembering that in using the word of seventeenth- 
century writers we must observe the sense, then more specially 
attached to it, of intellectual keenness, not necessarily, though very 
often, exhibited in relation to the ludicrous. South has still some- 
thing of Elizabethan conceit and word-play, and a great deal of 
Jacobean scholasticism. But the new style of restricted antithetical 
balance which was rising around him affected him a good deal, though 
not to the same extent as that to which it affected Tillotson or Temple 
or Dryden, so that he comes in best for notice here, and not with 
them. 

For he retains that fondness for luminous if also audacious imagery 
which, though certainly not absent from Dryden, or even from 
Temple, was to be more and more restricted both in tliem and in 
their followers. His famous sentence, "An Aristotle was but the 
rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise," 
unites seventeenth-century splendour of fancy — the sudden blaze of 
the imaginative rocket — with eighteenth-century balance, antitheses, 
and point. It can be matched with hundreds of single things, hardly 
less ingenious and successful, while South is also able to build up 
larger sentences, till he reminds us, not so constantly, of Browne 
before and Temple after him in the two styles. Thus, while he never 
has the beauty of Taylor, while he lacks the easy lambent light of 
Fuller's wit, he is in better fighting trim, better balanced, less unequal 
and disquieting than either, and provides in almost all his work 
quite admirable examples of the more scholastic prose. 

Isaac Barrow,"^ who was a little older than South, was also a 
Londoner, born in 1630, but his school was Charterhouse. Hence 
he passed to Felsted, in Essex, and to Trinity College, Cambridge, 
of which he became Fellow in 1649. He was known 
as a strong Cavalier and Churchman, and this for the 
time prevented the further promotion which his extraordinary 
abilities, both on the literary and scientific sides, would have gained 
him, and he travelled much abroad. On the eve of the Restoration 
he became Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and after it a Fellow 
of the Royal Societ}', Gresham Professor of Geometry, and Lucasian 
Professor of Mathematics, where Newton followed him. The King 
always greatly fancied his preaching, and in 1672 made him Master 

^ 4 vols. London, 1843. 
2 Works (non-mathematical), ed. Napier, 9 vols. Cambridge, 1859. 



CH. IV THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — H 445 

of Trinity, but he died tive years later. Barrow's style is less severe 
than Sooth's, but also a little less technically good, more disposed to 
long and wandering sentences, though in other respects perhaps more 
modern. 

We need pause less on some others. Bishop Pearson (1612- 
86), though a longer liver than Barrow, was born much earlier, 
and his birth-date is reflected in the style of his famous treatise On 
the Creed and his other works. He was a Norfolk 
man, a son of Eton and of King's College, Cambridge, chiiiinc- 
a Royalist chaplain (though he does not seem to have worth, Hales, 

■' ^ . , , . , , anu others. 

been much interfered with during the Commonwealth) ; 
and after the Restoration Master of Jesus, Lady Margaret Professor 
of Divinity, Master of Trinity, and Bishop of Chester. Richard 
Baxter, one of the lights of English Nonconformity, was a little 
younger than Pearson, and lived a little longer (161 5-91). He 
was neither ill-born nor very ill-educated, but went to no University, 
and after some changes of mind, became a schoolmaster and took 
orders. His duty was chiefly at Kidderminster, with which town 
he was throughout his life most connected. He welcomed the 
Restoration, and might have had a bishopric, but scrupled, and 
"went out" in 1662, his recalcitrance to the law being, of course, 
followed by some inconveniences, but by nothing serious till the 
tyranny of James H. His Saints'' Rest (1650), his Call to the 
6'>/a;;/'yi'r/d?rf (1657), and the agreeable posthumous work published in 
1696 as Reliquiae Baxterianae, are perhaps the most important for us 
out of a very large total of work. Baxter, who is said never to have 
altered or corrected his work, and whose style, though neither so 
vernacular nor so racy, has a certain approximation to Bunyan's, is a 
distinctly pleasant writer, if not very much more. 

This rich period contains in theology, as in other departments, 
much that it would be interesting to comment upon. John Hales 
( 1 584-1 656), the " ever memorable," was born at Bath and educated 
there and at Cambridge, but transferred himself to Oxford, where he 
became a Fellow of Merton and a lecturer in Greek. In i6ig, or 
earlier, he was made a Fellow of Eton College, and lived there all 
the rest of his life, though he was deprived of his Fellowship after the 
King's death. He was one of Falkland's set in Oxfordshire and of 
Jonson's in London, and a mighty admirer of Shakespeare. His 
repute is rather greater than his works, 1 which consist of tracts, 
sermons, and letters from the Synod of Dort, where he went with Sir 
Dudley Carleton. His cliief single work is the tract on Schism and 
Schismatics, 1636. It and the rest of his works contain arguments 

^ Ed. Dalrymple (Lord Hailes), 3 vols. Glasgow, 1765. 



446 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vil 

for toleration, and for a sort of orthodox freethinking. expressed in a 
ratlier undistinguished style. It is supposed to have been written 
against, or at least in reference to, the Religion of Protestants of 
William Chillingworth, who was born at Oxford in 1602, was much 
favoured by Laud, became Fellow of Trinity in 1628, see-sawed a 
good deal in religion, but after an experience of Romanism returned 
to the Church of England, was Royalist in the Rebellion, and died 
soon after the capture of Arundel Castle, where he was taken prisoner 
in 1644. The principal merit of his style (and in his days it was no 
common one) is its extreme clearness. George Herbert wrote some 
prose very like his verse. Archbishop Robert Leighton (161 1-84) 
was born and educated at Edinburgh, where he was Principal and 
Divinity Professor in the University ; later travelled a good deal ; 
became Bisliop of Dunblane in 1661 and Archbishop of Glasgow in 
1669; resigned and died at Horsted Keynes in 1684. His character, 
in a position likely to attract slander, excited universal admiration ; 
his style (shown chiefly in Commentaries on the Scriptures, wliich 
had an inmiense influence on Coleridge) has been highl)-, though 
not always clearly, praised. It belongs to the class of the great 
imaginative styles of his time. Bishop Wilkins (1614-72), a man 
with a rather questionable record, who married Oliver's sister and 
contrived to make the best of both sides in the struggle between 
King and Parliament, and of both Universities, being Warden of 
Wadham at Oxford and iVIaster of Trinity at Cambridge, was an 
early student of physical science, and member of the Royal Society. 
His works. Discovery of a New World, Discourse concerning a New 
Planet, Mathematical Magic and Essay towards a Philosophical {i.e. 
universal) Language, display in their very titles the survival of the 
fantastic. His style is simple and lively enough. 

Lastly, the famous school of metaphysical theologians, called the 
Cambridge Platonists, produced in Henry More, the poet, and still 
more in Ralph Cudworth, the author of the True Iidellcctual System 
of the Universe (1678), notable prose-writers. Cudworth, born 1617, 
in Somerset, entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1630, and 
becoming successively Master of Clare, Professor of Hebrew, and 
Master of Christ's, died 1688. Besides his great book, which is a sort 
of history of philosophy as well as a contril)ution to it, Cudworth wrote 
a treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality, and other things. 
Though he has nothing like the vigour and distinction of his enemy, 
Hobbes, as a prose-writer, Cudworth stands high among our early 
philosophers for his style, which, if not exactly elegant and never 
splendid, is solid and clear. 



CHAPTER V 

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 

Milton's prose — Its faults and beauties — Sir Thomas Browne — Religio Medici — 
Vulgar Errors — Urn Burial — The Garden of Cyrus — Clarendon — Hobbes 
— Felltham — ■ Howell — Walton 

The eminence of this remarkable ijeriod is certainly not least shown 
in the department of miscellaneous prose. After dealing with the 
theologians, we have still left the prose work of Milton, Sir Thomas 
Browne, Hobbes, and Clarendon, together with not a , 

few minor prose writers of quality from Walton down- ' °" ^ '^™^'^' 
wards. Milton's prose work, as has already been said, was in the 
main, though not quite wholly, comprised in the twenty years of his 
middle age, and is again mainly, though not quite wholly, controver- 
sial in character. The great bulk of it is an instance of the unwisdom 
of objecting to the distinction of matter and manner in literary history. 
If we look at the matter, it requires almost desperate partisanship to 
put much of Milton's prose work high. Except the Areopagitica 
and the Letter to Education, almost all of it is more than question- 
able. The divorce tracts are dubious from the point of view of public 
morality, and ludicrously one-sided as expressions of private spleen. 
The rudeness, the sheer ill-manners of the political and educational 
pamphlets are allowed by all except those who decline to see any 
fault in the author of Paradise Lost. Even as a controversialist, all 
questions of taste and literary courtesy put aside, Milton is too one- 
sided, too passionate, and too weak in mere argumentative power to 
receive high praise from impartial criticism. 

But when we turn to the mere form of his prose the case is quite 
altered. It is true that even here praise cannot be indiscriminate, 
and that there have been some who, even on formal grounds, have 
denied to Milton very high rank as a prose-writer. But some trick 
of imperfect sympathy may in such cases be suspected. It is true 
that Milton is by no means a faultless writer; he is, indeed, a very 
faulty one. Nothing is more curious than to see how he, the great 

447 



448 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

architect of the paragraph and the sentence in verse, seems to be 
utterly ignorant of the laws of both in prose, or at least utterly inca- 
pable or careless of obeying those laws. On many, perhaps on most, 
occasions the gorgeous harmonic phrases, of which in prose as in 
verse he is a master, entirely fail to adjust themselves to any kind of 
symphonic arrangement. They clash and welter against each other, 
or suddenly quaver off into some cacophony or insignificance of close 
which destroys their effect and value. The pleas that Milton's 
writing was constantly not merely rhetorical, but oraiorical, and that 
we must give it the license of heard matter, as well as that his blindness 
latterly made correction difficult, have a certain validity as excuses, 
but not as defence. And the first, at least, can be only partially 
admitted as fact. There are sentences of Milton's which, though ugly 
on the page, would be harmonious on the platform or in the pulpit, 
but there are others, and many of them, which would be ugly any- 
where. 

The fact evidently is tliat Milton, to whom prose was not, as verse 
was, his native organ of speech, suffered exceptionally from the three 
vices of the prose of his age — the tendency to an unduly laboured 

vocabulary, that to an unduly Latinised syntax, and that 
and\eau't'fes. ^^ enomiously long sentences. For tlie two first there 

was in his case, as all fair critics have acknowledged, 
not merely the excuse that men of letters read more Latin than 
English, but the particular one that it was the custom, and latterly the 
business, of this man of letters to write more in Latin than in English. 
And it seems strange that any one should be capable of denying the 
splendour of Milton's prose at its best. The gorgeous evocations of 
vision, how " for us the Northern Ocean, even to the frozen Thule, 
was scattered with the proud shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada"; 
the thunder of single phrases, " the dateless and irrevoluble circle " ; 
the famous comparison between the poet, with his garland and singing 
robes about him, and the same sitting in the cool element of prose ; 
and the almost more famous one as to the wandering of his younger 
feet among those lofty fables and romances ; the magnificent search 
for the Dead Truth in the Areopagitica, — other things, not much 
below these, are there to prove his quality. We could have had them 
from no one Ixit Milton, for the best of them have a certain quality 
or inseparable accident of egotism, not to say arrogance, about them 
of which Shakespeare and Spenser and Shelley, and others of the 
greatest, could never have been capable, and which yet gives them 
the swell of their cadence and the thrill of their ring. So let us be 
thankful for even the egotism of Milton. 

The humour which Milton so profoundly lacked, together with 
a certain detachment which (for his and cur good, no doubt) he 



CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 449 

lacked likewise, were both present in the next writer to be mentioned, 
the greatest prose-writer perhaps, when all things are taken together, 
in the whole range of English. Thomas Browne,^ who gj^. 

became Sir Thomas in the last years of his life, was Thomas 
born in London on 19th October 1605. His father, 
who was in trade but of a good Cheshire extraction, died when 
Thomas was a child, and his mother married a certain Sir Thomas 
Button. The boy was sent to school at Winchester, and thence to 
Broadgates Hall, Oxford, which, before he left it, was turned into 
Pembroke College. He took his Master's degree in 1629, and then 
studied medicine at Leyden, graduating there as doctor. After some 
years of travel and of practice in different places, he settled in the 
year 1636 at Norwich, with which city he was connected for nearly 
tifty years, marrying a Norfolk lady a few years later, and passing 
bad, worse, and better times (as Fullers classification has it) in 
inoffensive and unmolested prosperity. His knighthood took place 
in 1671, and his death in 1682. Besides letters and a few minor 
miscellanies, we have from him five capital works, very different 
from each other in size, but of pretty uniform excellence as 
literature — Rcligio Medici^ written, it would appear, pretty early 
(about 1635), but not printed till 1642; Fseudodoxia Epidei/iica, 
better known by its English title of Vulgar Errors, 1646; Urn 
Burial and the Garden of Cyrus, published together in 1658; and 
the posthumous Christian Morals, which was not printed till 1716 
and was edited forty years later by the great light of his college in 
the next century, and its great Christian moralist, Samuel Johnson. 
Every one of these works, from the mere pamphlets which contain 
the third and fourth to the bulky treatise on Errors, is of the very 
first importance in English literature. > 

Religio Medici has perhaps been the general favourite, a position 
at least deserved by the fact that it contains the first-fruits of 
Browne's extraordinary style, that it is a sort of key to the others, 
and that it displays, as does no other book, the mental 
attitude of the older and better generation of the Me'Iki. 
Jacobean and Caroline time.\ This attitude may be 
taken as resulting from the following conditions. An immense but 
what we may perhaps call a somewhat lopsided erudition — ancient 
writers and modern writers in Latin being insufficiently balanced 
by those in the modern tongues ; science, in the modern sense, 
conspicuous, but as yet unorganised ; a wide and deep, but by no 

1 Ed. Simon Wilkin, in 4 vols , reprinted (not quite completely) in three of 
Bohn's Library. Religio Medici, Christian Morals, Urn Burial, and the Garden 
of Cyrus, are accessible in two small volumes of tlie " Golden Treasury," one 
edited with great care, and the other begun, by Dr. Greenhill. 

2G 



450 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

means necessarily unorthodox, and scarcely at all scornful, scepticism ; 
and a gorgeous setting glow of poetical fancy. The result was an 
inevitable melancholy in all the choicer souls, except those where 
" cheerfulness would break in," as with Fuller ; or those who were 
furiously devoted to the strife of the time and otherwise wrapt up in 
themselves, as with Milton — inevitable, though this melancholy might 
be erudite and discursive, as in Burton ; mystical and sensuous, as in 
Donne ; hectically religious, as in Crashaw ; meditatively so, as in 
Vaughan. In Browne it is, as melancholy, kept in the background. 
He has not merely, like Burton, his learning ever present, but a 
practical and busy art ; religious as he is, he does not become 
absorbed in religion like Crashaw or Herbert or Vaughan ; his blood 
is cooler, and his brain less trammelled with occult things than Donne's. 
And the result is the Rcligio, a confession of intelligent orthodoxy and 
logical supernaturalism couched in some of the most exquisite English 
ever written. 

The great medley of the Pseudodoxia is more puzzling to modern 
ideas. Here Browne first discusses the general subject of delusion 
in a fashion singularly different from, though perhaps not less 

philosophical than, that which would suggest itself to 
Errfrs. most people. Now and then he takes the errors one by 

one, but the fact is that " errors " is not quite the 
right word. Pseudodoxy, as opposed to orthodoxy, consists in the 
assumption, as positive truths, of things unproved, in the explanation 
of undoubted phenomena by wrong causes, at least as much as in 
the belief in things certainly false. Very often he will not go 
beyond the position that the popular creed may be, with more 
reason, denied or affirmed ; sometimes he has possible explainings 
away of difficult facts ; and it will readily be anticipated that he 
very often advances hypotheses more difficult for modern science to 
admit than the facts he wishes to explain. He is himself, though 
profoundly sceptical, by no means obstinately incredulous ; and if he 
cannot believe the magical qualities of gems, and must admit that 
" it hath much deceived the hopes of good fellows what is commonly 
expected of bitter almonds," he declares " that an unsavoury odour is 
gentilitious or natural unto the Jews, we cannot well conceive." 
Yet he is by no means prone, as his great editor and fellow- 
collegian was, to deny things simply because they are strange ; 
and the result is that the Pseudodoxia, written in a delightful style, 
ranging through a vast multitude of sometimes absurd but almost 
always interesting legends, anecdotes, beliefs, and lighted throughout 
with Browne's own special candles — his mild intelligence and his 
unaggressive irony — is one of the most charming books existing or 
conceivable. 



CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 45 1 

The little tractates called Hydn'otaphia, or Urn Burial, and The 
Garden of Cyras contain, the first but some half-hundred, the other 
some hundred small pages ; but between them they 
show the quintessence of Browne's thought, and the " "^'" ' 
palmary examples of his style. The first is perhaps the chief in- 
stance of his melancholy, meditative, yet pious and not unhopeful 
mysticism, the second of his mysticism fantastic. Hydriotaphia, 
starting from the fact of the discovery of some sepulchral urns in 
Norfolk, considers first, in a sweeping yet punctilious generalisation, 
the various historic methods of sepulture, or rather disposal of the 
dead. Then it passes to the sepulchral antiquities of Ilritain, and 
thence to urns and their contents, with some considerations on the 
relative durability of different j^arts of the human body. A chapter 
on funeral ceremonials, beliefs in immortality or annihilation and the 
like follows, and leads up to the ever-memorable finale, beginning, 
'' Now since these dead bones," which has rung in the ears of some 
eight generations as the very and unsurpassable Dead March of Eng- 
lish Prose. Every word of this chapter is memorable, and almost every 
word abides in the memory by dint of Browne's marmoreal phrase, 
his great and grave meaning, and the wonderful clangour and echo 
of his word-music. "Time, which antiquates antiquities," will have 
some difficulty in destroying this. And through all the chapter 
his style, like his theme, rises, till after a wonderful burst of 
mysticism, we are left with such a dying close as never had been 
heard in English before, "ready to.be anything in the ecstasy 
of being ever, and as content with six foot as with the moles of 
Adrianus." 

The Garden of Cyrus, a study on the conveniences and delights 
of the quincunx ( ; • ; ) is a curious and no doubt a designed 
contrast, exhibiting, though without any Fullerian merriment, the 
lighter side of that seventeenth-century quaintness 
which disgusted and puzzled the eighteenth, and which, cfc'yrus." 
perhaps, the nineteenth has not for the most part 
genuinely sympathised with. We start gravely with the fact (or 
assertion) that Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana, the 
fifth day after their nativities, and so pass to the Gardens of 
Antiquity (for Browne is as much a lover of gardens as his younger 
contemporaries Cowley and Evelyn themselves), and to the quin- 
cuncial arrangement of those of Cyrus according to Xenoplion, 
with some remarks on the mysteries of decussation and its results, 
the various kinds of crosses. It is finally pointed out that in 
Paradise itself, the first garden, the Tree of Knowledge appropriately 
supplies a centre of this decussation. But the quincunx is far from 
limited to planting — architecture, crowns, beds, nets, tactics, and many 



452 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

other things display it. It, or its number Five, is in the flowers in 
gypsum, in honey-combs, in the belly of the water-beetle, '- though 
we found not what we expected in the cartilaginous parts of the 
weasand, and the discernible texture of the lungs of frogs.'' The 
excellence of planting in this form is returned to : rams' horns, by 
the way, will grow if planted at Goa. And lastly, with an apology, 
some other mysteries of Five are touched, till the whole ends again 
with another triumph of elaborate rhetorical art, "But the quincunx 
of Heaven runs low," etc. 

It is not at all uninteresting or unimportant that the posthumous 
Christian Morals, though as characteristic of Browne's thought, style, 
and vocabulary as any of the others, has somewhat less finished 
splendour, and indeed ends with a sort of duplication of the finale 
of tlie Urn Burial. For this, it must be remembered, the author 
himself never published, and the fact shows (what indeed is certain 
from other evidence, both internal and external) that Sir Thomas 
was a very studious corrector of his own work. Nor could any one 
have improvised such miracles of execution in prose as the best 
things in the earlier books. Except in these respects, and in the 
somewhat more sober cast which its practical purpose imposes on 
it, the book is entirely of a piece with the others — the same 
gorgeously Latinised terminology, which somehow never becomes 
stiiT or awkward ; the same sententious weight, which is never heavy 
or dull ; the same cunning construction of sentences and paragraphs ; 
and above all, the same extraordinary power of transforming a 
commonplace into the eternal idea corresponding to it by some 
far-reaching image, some illustration quaintly erudite, or even by sheer 
and mere beauty of phrase and expression. 

For this is the great merit of Browne, that, quaint or gorgeous, 
or even, as he sometimes may seem to be, merely tricksy — bringing 
out of the treasures of his wisdom and his wit and his learning 
things new and old, for the mere pleasure of showing them — thought 
and expression are always at one in him, just as they are in the 
great poets. Tlie one is never below the other, and both are 
always worthy of the placid, partly sad, wholly conscious and 
intelligent, sense of the riddles of life which serves them as a back- 
ground. 

As if to justify Browne's own theory of the quincunx, there were 
at the same time with him, with Milton, and with Taylor, two other 
prose writers of the first class, though of different kinds, Edward 
Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and Thomas Hobbcs. Hyde,^ whose name 
and extraction came from Cheshire, though he was a Wiltshireman by 

1 Clarendon's works were presented by his heirs to the University of Oxford, 
and have ahvays been issued by the University Press, which bears his name. 



CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 453 

birth, was born in 1608, was educated at Oxford (Magdalen Hall), and 
then practised law. At first a younger son, he came into the prop- 
erty by the death of his brothers. His early Opposi- 
tion attitude in the struggle between the King and the 
Parliament was, like that of other good lawyers, chiefly dictated by 
dislike of the few or false precedents adduced for some actions of the 
Crown. He was also a very strong Anglican, and irreconcilably opposed 
to Presbyterianism, and from 1641 onward he was the King's chief 
ostensible adviser, though unluckily his influence was more apparent 
than real. He followed first the King and then the Prince of Wales, 
becoming later chief minister to Charles II. in his exile and poverty, 
as well as father-in-law to tlie future James II. At the Restoi'ation 
he still remained Charles's Prime Minister, but he became, partly no 
doubt by his own fault, unpopular, and being left in the lurch by the 
King, was impeached, and quitted England in 1667. He lived at 
Montpellier and Rouen for seven years longer, and died at the Norman 
capital in 1674. Nothing of his was published till the eighteenth 
century, but he had written much, beginning his famous history, in 
tlie narrow room of Scilly, as early as 1646. And this appeared in 
1704. Later he wrote his own Life, but for literature his importance 
consists in the History of the Great Rebellion. 

Clarendon's personal character and his political action have, as 
was inevitable, been judged rather too much according to the judge's 
political sympathies, and this fashion of judgment has extended even 
to his literary merits. On these last, however, there should be no 
serious difference. His demerits are sufficiently obvious — they 
consist first in an awkward syntax, secondly, and still more,' in the 
most extraordinary sentences, piled up to appalling bulk by additions, 
parentheses, and a complete contempt of the humble art of punctua- 
tion. His merits, on the other hand, are, as regards the general 
scheme of his book, what has justly been called an epical composition 
— a sense of the central story and its unfolding ; and in regard to 
individual passages, a singular accomplishment and skill. Few 
historians, prolix as he seems to be, can describe a given event — a 
battle, a debate or what not — with more vividness than Clarendon. 
But not one in all the long list of the great practitioners of the art has 
such skill at the personal Character. This character, it has been already 
observed, was a favourite exercise of the time, both in France and in 
England ; but Clarendon's are far the greatest. He is accused of 
partisanship by partisans, but this would matter little, even if the 
accusation were just. For what we want to see is how Clarendon can 
draw us the portrait he wanted to paint. Its justice concerns history : 
literature is only busied with its art. 

Thomas Hobbes was twenty years older than Clarendon. He 



454 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

came from the same county (where, at Mahnesbury, he was born on 
5th April 1588) and went to the same college. When quite a young 
man he became attached, as tutor, to the family of 
Cavendish, and remained a friend, and for the most part 
an inmate, of that family for almost the whole residue of his long life. 
He was acquainted with Bacon, and, it would seem, with most of the 
literary men of the capital in the days of James and Charles, but 
published nothing himself till 1628, and then only a translation — 
though a very remarkable one — of Thucydides. He was much 
abroad, sometimes in charge of pupils, but published nothing of his 
own till 1642, when De Cive appeared. The more famous Leviathan 
did not appear till nine years later, in its author's grand climacteric. 
Hobbes was pensioned at the Restoration, but still lived chiefly with 
the Devonshire family, and died at their seat of Hardwick Hall in 
Derbyshire on 4th December 1679, having come well within a decade 
of seeing both the Armada and the Revolution. His work ^ is 
extensive, and much of it exists in duplicate, for Hobbes followed 
Bacon's plan of issuing his work both in Latin and English. His 
eccentric fancy of trying to translate Homer into verse, with an 
excessively wooden result, is of no importance for literature, nor are 
his generally mistaken mathematical works. But his books on 
political and other philosophy are the first things on the subject in 
English which unite very original thought with a masterly and 
individual style. The extreme nominalism of their metaphysics, the 
absolutism of their politics, and the rather inferential than declared 
freethought of their religion, do not concern us here, though all had 
a great effect on English philosophy, and through it, by way of 
answers, deductions, and the like, on English literature. 

Hobbes, however, miglit have been much less remarkable on these 
points, and yet have held a very important place in the history of 
literature itself His style stands very much alone, and with the 
usual allowance for personal idiosyncrasy, seems to have been formed 
by two main influences. The first of these was his practice in 
translating Thucydides, whom he has followed, in the brevity 
and pregnant compression of his manner, without imitating the 
Thucydidean license of syntax. The second may be connected with 
his own philosophical doctrines, which made him regard words as 
things of stable and rigid signification, to be kept strictly to certain 
concrete meanings, and handled with the same absence of vagueness 
as if they were figures or coins. If there is any style before him to 
which his bears special resemblance, it is that of Ben Jonson, while 
there are also, and naturally, a few resemblances to Bacon. As a 

i Ed. Moleswoith, 16 vols. London, 1839-45. The English works fill ten of 
these, with an eleventh for inde.x. 



CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 455 

whole, though devoid of ornament to a degree which may sometimes 
seem ahiiost reiDulsive, it is one of admirable vigour, clearness, and 
adaptability, especially for argumentative purposes. It shows at once 
most popularly, and not to least technical advantage, in the wonderful 
little treatise on Hinnan Nature. 

At least five other prose-writers of this period must receive a 
short detailed notice — Felltham, Howell, Walton, Harrington, and 
Lord Herbert of Cherbury. 

Of Owen Felltham (6". idoo-c. 1680), once more, "little or nothing 
is known." He was a Suffolk man, and wrote several things in prose 
and verse, but his fame rests" entirely on his Resolves?- Although 
this book was so popular that a ninth edition at least 
appeared during the author's lifetime, and an eleventh in 
1708, after which it went out of fashion for a century, we do not 
know exactly when the first edition appeared. The second is dated 
1628. It is, in fact, a book of Essays, showing the extremely 
strong nisiis of the time towards that form. There are a hundred 
and eighty-five of them, the subjects and the general treatment being 
not unlike Bacon's, though far less magniloquent. Yet Felltham 
wrote well, thought wisely, and sometimes gives curiously fresh traits 
and touches of his time in manner as well as thought. His verses 
in the metaphysical kind are more curious than poetical, his 
observations on the Low Countries shrewd enough, and some letters 
agreeable. 

Felltham's letters, however, are few, and by no means the most 
noteworthy part of his work ; those of James Howell - hold one of the 
principal places in English epistolary literature, and being themselves 
considerable in bulk, have survived, almost alone, from 3- „ „ 
much larger body of compositions by their author. He was 
born at Abernant in Carmarthenshire about 1594, was educated at 
Hereford School and Jesus College, Oxford, and showing a^Dtitude 
for business, had various commissions abroad of a commercial nature 
at Venice (to import glass workers), in Spain (to recover debts due 
in England), etc. At home he was one of Ben Jonson's '• sons," and 
had numerous patrons through whom he obtained divers employ- 
ments, ending in the important one of Clerk of the Council. This, 
however, was just before the outbreak of the Rebellion, and Howell 
reaped from, it chiefly imprisonment. He became Historiographer 
Royal at the Restoration, and died in 1666. His Letters^ which 

1 Reprinted early in this century by Cummings (London, 1820), but in a 
somewhat garbled form. The contemporary editions are preferable. 

2 Contemporary copies also numerous ; indeed, editions continued to be 
multiplied till well into the eighteenth century. Mr. Jacobs has edited a hand- 
some reissue (2 vols. London, 1890). 



456 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

alone need concern us here, extend over a very long period, 
and in some cases certainly, in many probably, are not so much 
genuine letters as Essays thrown into epistolary form. At other 
times, however, and specially in those dealing with his foreign travels, 
there is no reason to suspect their trustworthiness, and the medley of 
their subjects, dealt with in a gossiping style, but by no means without 
knowledge, and with a curious profusion of details of the most various 
kind, has always been found agreeable by good judges. 

We still rise in the scale of general acceptance as we come to 
Izaak Walton,^ one of the most popular, and justly popular, of 
English writers. He was born at Stafford in August 1593, but 
became a Londoner, and carried on the trade of linen 
draper, " sempster," etc. His first wife was a great- 
grand-niece of Cranmer, and his second a half-sister of Ken, con- 
nections not more causing, than springing from, his intimate and deep 
affection and loyalty to tlie Church of England. He was the friend 
of Donne, of Bishops Morley, Sanderson, and King, and of Sir Henry 
Wotton, lived latterly at Winchester, where his son-in-law Dr. 
Hawkins was prebendar}-, and died there in 1683. He lives in 
literature by his Complete A;/g/er, the first edition of which — it was 
afterwards much altered and supplemented by Cotton — appeared in 
1653, in the depth of Fuller's ''worst times," and by five short but 
admirable biographies of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert, and San- 
derson. It is impossible to overpraise Walton's books, which are 
among the most unique and agreeable possessions of English literature, 
but it is possible to mispraise them, and this has often been done. It is 
questionable whether he had any literary art ; his charm is exactly 
that of the conversation of one of the rare children who from time to 
time concentrate the charms of childhood. As he happened to live in 
the greatest of our literary ages ; as he had no vanity, no bad taste, 
great friends, and the luck to set out what he thought about them 
and about his favourite pastime quite simply, he is admirable and 
delectable, and stands by himself. 

The brother of one of his heroes. Lord Herbert of Cherbury,^ is 
as pretty and complete a contrast to Walton as can well be imagined. 
In Walton, for all his infantile grace, there is not a touch of the cox- 
comb. Lord Herbert is coxcombry personified. He was born early 
enough (1583) to take a strong cast of the Elizabethan character, 
but he displays only its foibles, or some of them. His poems, which 
are not numerous, display a tone which, though never religious and 
not always moral, is still that of his brother transposed ; their chief 

1 Editions innumerable. 

2 Autobiography, ed. S. L. Lee, London, 1886 ; Poems, ed. J. C. Collins, 
London, 1881. 



MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 



457 



interest is the occurrence in them of the In Memoriani metre, with 
not a few instances of its well-known cadence, and of the mould of 
phrase and thought which, like the Spenserian, it imposes almost 
automatically on poets. He wrote in Latin De Veritate, Religio 
Laid, and other things w^iich have the not covetable honour of 
having founded English Deism, and are, at any rate, expressions of 
the scepticism which in nobler contemporaries produced magnificent 
work. His English productions are a History of Henry VIII., 
printed the year after his death, which occurred in 1648, and his 
very astonishing and rather popular Autobiography,, which did not 
appear till Horace Walpole printed it in 1764. Herbert behaved 
very badly in the RebeUion, and his own accounts of his personal 
prowess earlier are uncorroborated by external evidence ; but he is 
not inconsiderable as a man of letters. If Shakespeare knew him, 
which is quite possible, it is a thousand pities that he did not put 
him into a play. The counterfeit would have had, and deserved, all 
the literary graces of Adriano de Armado and of Polonius in his 
speeches ; in his actions he might have supplied a dignified pendant 
to Parolles. 

James Harrington,^ a much more agreeable person, and a better 
though quainter writer, may fitly close this chapter. He was the 
son of a knight in the county of Rutland. He was born in 161 1, 
and was a member of Trinity College, Oxford, came early into a fair 
fortune, and enjoyed the advantages of travel and court attendance. 
Though of republican principles, he sympathetically attended Charles I. 
in his captivity, and was with the King to the " memorable scene " 
itself. During the interregnum (1656) he wrote Oceana. At the 
Restoration he was imprisoned, but released, and lived till 1677. 

Harrington was undoubtedly mad at certain times, and perhaps 
not quite sane at any. But his imaginary Commonwealth, Oceana,"^ 
makes the subject of a very delightful though excessively odd book, 
wherein the project for a doctrinaire republic is worked out with all 
the learning, all the quaintness, and almost all the splendour of these 
mid-seventeenth-century writers, and with a profusion of fancy that 
never comes very far short of expression suitable to it. His other 
works are mostly unimportant. 

1 Not to be confounded with the earlier Sir John Har(r)ington (1561-1612), 
godson of Queen Elizabeth, translator of Ariosto, and author of some serious litera- 
ture, and some curiosities thereof. 

2 Ed. H. Morley, London, 1887. 



CHAPTER VI 

SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE 

Reformation verse — Alexander Scott — Montgomerie — Sir Robert Ayton — The 
Earl of Stirling — Drummond — Prose — The Complaint of Scotland — Knox 
and Buchanan — King James — Sir Thomas Urquhart 

When we last handled the special Scottish division of English liter- 
ature, it was up to the death of Sir David Lyndsay, and not long 
before the birth of James VI. and I. . James had not been long dead, 
his son was but just executed, when definitely Scots literature came 
to an end altogether, or was continued, in poetry and belles leitres at 
least, only by a few stragglers like the Sempills of Beltrees,^ to the 
time when the older part of it was revived as a curiosity by Watson 
and Allan Ramsay, and inspired some fresh attempts. To endeavour 
to account for this is not necessary ; indeed, all such accounts must 
be mainly guesswork. It is enough to say that, as in the other case 
of the dying out of Anglo-Saxon, the most obvious explanation is by 
no means the safest or most probable. As there would probably 
have been little more Anglo-Saxon literature if there had been no 
Conqueror in 1066, so there would probably have been little Scots 
literature had there been no Union of Crowns in 1603. Both lan- 
guages were ceasing to be equal to the literary demands on them, and 
both ceased to produce literature. 

The Reformation struggle itself contributed a little to Scottish 
verse, but it cannot be said to have contributed much to Scottish 
poetry. The famous Glide and Godlie Ballates- — perhaps due to 

the Vedderburnes or Wedderburns — and the miscellanies 
^^vel"se!'°" mostly attributed to Robert Sempill (not one of the 

Beltrees family), which have been collected as Satirical 
Poems of the Reformation,^ are very rarely of poetical value. Hardly 

1 See their Poems, ed. Paterson, Edinburgh, 1849. There is, however, some 
guesswork about the attributions. 

2 Ed. Mitchell. S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1897. 

3 Ed. Cranstoun, S.T.S., 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1891. 

458 



CHAr. VI SCOTS POEl-RY AND PROSE 459 

anything in the former repeats the vigour and " go " of the celebrated 
" Hey, trix ! trim go trix ! " which Sir Walter, as far as he could, 
inserted in The Abbot. The other " Gude and Godlie " pieces are 
either pious but not specially poetical, or else smirched with the 
savage moroseness which is the disgrace of the Protestant party. 
This appears to a far worse degree in tlie '" Satirical " poems. Some 
of these, which have very little to do with the Reformation, are simply 
ballads, rather ribald but not unamusing, yet hardly ever poetical. 
Still, we may congratulate ourselves that the authors wrote them 
rather than such serious and decorous work as that of John Rolland,^ 
who is the chief named poet between Lyndsay and Scott. ^ Rolland, 
of whom very little is known, but who seems to have been a Dalkeith 
man, composed two poems of some length, both on merely aiediaeval 
and, or at latest, fifteenth-century subjects, and in styles to match — 
the Seiein Sages and the Court of Venice. It is perhaps enough to 
say that in the latter he very nearly clears away the shame of Eng- 
land when Lydgate and Occleve are compared with Henryson and 
Dunbar. He certainly provides the very dullest and most prosaic 
poetry, if not exactly the worst verse, of the entire school, whether 
northern or southern. 

The latest poets of distinction in the older Scots were, however, 
found, a little after these, in Alexander Scott and Alexander Mont- 
gomerie. Here also we cannot but be struck by the extreme antiquity 
of their forms as compared with those of their English contemporaries. 
Scott, who was in all probability still writing when Spenser began, 
is almost indistinguishable except philologically, if even so, from 
Dunbar ; The Cherry and the Slae, Montgomerie's great work, is in 
the exact allegorical tone of the fifteenth and even of the fourteenth 
century, though its author does not seem to have died much before 
Shakespeare. 

Scott, however, redeems the poetical fame of the reign of Queen 
Mary. We know really nothing about him. We can even date 
only two of his poems,"'' the Lament of the Master of Erskine, 
who was killed at Pinkie, and the Welcome to Queen 
Mary in 1562. He seems to have been unlucky in his Scott. " 
married life, and if he is the "old Scott" to whom 
Montgomery refers, he was apparently no more successful than 
most poets in acquiring a fortune. But all this, except the dates, 
comes to really nothing. From him. or attributed to him, we have 

'^Seitiii Sashes, Ballantyne Club, 1837; Court of Venus, ed. Gregor, S.T.S., 
Edinburgh, 1884. 

2 The Court of Venus, not printed till 1575, seems to have been written before 
1560. 

3 Ed. Cranstoun, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1896. 



46o CAROLINE LITERATURE 



just three dozen pieces, none of them long. Most are love-poems, 
the rest compUmentary, sathical, or occasional in one way or another, 
with one or two sacred — in fact the usual tarrago of the poets of his 
time. Scott has no one favourite metre ; he will write in octaves with 
abundance of " aureate " terms — " genetrice," " celsitude," and the 
like — as in the address to Queen Mary ; in the popular Chrisfs Kirk 
on the Green metre, as in the "jousting and debate between Adam- 
son and Sym"; and in many other metres, mostly lyrical, and all 
managed with skill. He is not free from the excessive coarseness in 
pliraseology which has already been noted, and, unlike Lyndsay, he 
does not accompany looseness of speech with any great preciseness 
in moral teaching. But he is a really agreeable poet of love in his 
way, playful, musical, and in the poem which bears the epigraph, 
''When his Wife left Him," really pathetic, with a not unmanly 
revulsion later to the indignant resolve to " choose ane other and 
forget her," instead of continuing " to break mine heart and not the 
better," the last plirase forming, with slight changes, the refrain of the 
poem. 

Alexander Montgomerie^ is a much more tangible person, and a 

rather more considerable poet than Scott ; yet even about him our 

personal information is by no means abundant. He is said to have 

. been born at Hazelhead Castle in Ayrshire, not later 

Moiitgomene. , , , , , , . . , , . 

than 1550, and to have belonged to a junior brancli 01 
the Eglinton family. Another tradition identifies the scene of T]ie 
CJterry and the Slae witli the junction of the Tarff and the Dee just 
above Kirkcudbright. He was in the service of the Regent Morton, 
and then in the King's about 1578, being called "Captain," with 
exactly what right is not known. James received sonnets from liim, 
and quotes him in his Reivlis and Cautelis {vide post), but it does not 
appear that he ever did much for him, except giving him 500 meiks 
a 3-ear, chargeable on the Archbishopric of Glasgow. He r '.tions 
many persons, some known, some unknown, as his friends. e got 
into some not clearly defined trouble, was dismissed from court, and 
lost his pension, but had it restored or confirmed by legai process in 
1588, and we know that he was dead in 161 5. 

His works consist of one long and (at least by name) tolerably 
well-known poem. The Cherry and the Slae, a " Flyting " of the old 
kind with Hume of Polwarth, seventy sonnets, about as many more 
short miscellaneous poems, mostly secular, about half a score devo- 
tional pieces, and not quite a score versions of psalms and canticles. 

The Cherry and the Slae is allegorical, though there is not uni- 
versal consent as to what the allegory is. It turns at any rate on the 

1 Ed. Cranstoun, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1887. 



CHAP. VI SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE 461 

contrast between the cherry growing aloft and afar, the sloe beneath 
and at hand, the cherry sweet and precious, the sloe bitter and despised. 
A highborn love and a lowly one, virtue and vice, have been sug- 
gested, to which one might obviously add success and failure, learning 
and an idle life, and a hundred other pairs. The metre is peculiar, 
and became exti-emely popular in Scotland, so that it is better known 
by imitations than in the original, and may possibly have been com- 
bined by Montgomerie himself, though, as we have seen, northern 
poets in the alliteration -l-metre-and-rhyme stage had been extremely 
curious in their complicated arrangements. It is a quatorzain made 
up of the common sixain of 886886, rhymed aabaab, than a quatrain, 
8686, rhymed cdcd, and then another quatrain of sixes, rhymed 
efgf internally in the odd lines, and simply at the end in the even. 
Except that the complete separation of the rhymes of these three 
subdivisions rather interferes with the unity of the whole, it is a very 
artful and agreeable device. There are 114 such stanzas in the 
piece, making nearly 1600 lines, and Cupid, Hope, Experience, 
Reason, Will, Danger, and other old friends, from the days of the 
Rose downwards, take part in the conversation. But to modern 
readers the pleasant opening description (again the old Rose descrip- 
tion, but agreeably varied), the more original picture of the cherry- 
crowned crag and the effort to scale it, some well-expressed saws of 
mother wit, and a fine final stanza of praise, supply its attractions. 
The Flyting. alliterative, and of course foul-mouthed, is merely a 
curiosity. The sonnets, though not without a certain stiffness which 
we find in all the early attempts at that form in our language, have 
stateliness and even positive beauty, especially those to his mistress, 
who has been identified with his kinswoman. Lady Margaret Mont- 
gomerie. Many of his miscellaneous poems are to the same or other 
..lov^es, though we have among them a burlesque Navigation, and 
sphie strictly miscellaneous matter. It is perhaps on these that 
Mc ^'gomerie's claims may be most surely based, for he shows in them 
mc' J variety, as well as more strength, than Scott does. There is a 
quite fresh note in a piece which begins on an old string — 

Hay ! now the day dawis. 

The transition is curiously sharp to Sir Robert Ayton, who was 
more than a child at the probable date of the death of Scott, and a 
man far advanced in middle life before that of Montgomerie. He 
was a cadet of the family of Ayton of Kinaldie in Fife, 
and took his degree (having been born in 1570) at St. ''Ayton." 
Andrews in 1588. He travelled, but after the accession 
of James to the English throne came to court, was knighted, and 



462 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii 

became private secretary to Anne of Denmark, a position which he 
afterwards filled in the household of Henrietta Maria. He had 
diplomatic employments abroad, and at home was familiar with all 
the English wits from Ben Jonson downward. He died in 1638, 
and is buried in Westminster Abbey. He wrote in a good many 
languages, but the important thing for us is that his English poems 
do not affect the slightest Scots dialect. The most famous of them 
is the universally known 

I do confess thou'rt smooth and fair; 

while he has claims, inferior to those of Sempill, on the authorship of 
the original oi Aiild Lang Syne. 

The tendency which Ayton 1 thus shows to abandon the Scots 
altogether — a tendency which may be partly accounted for by the 
wish to get rid of the associated traditions of alliteration and 
allegory, partly by the temptations of a wider audience in Southern 
English — is shown much more strikingly, and in greater bulk and 
variety of illustration, by two poets who are usually linked, William 
Alexander, Earl of Stirling, and William Drummond of Hawthornden, 
to whom the great Marquis of Montrose may be added. 

The first named - was born at Menstrie, near Alloa, at a date not 
precisely ascertained — it used to be put at about 1580, but some hold 
that to be about a dozen years too late. He was well educated, and 

travelled with the seventh Earl of Argyll, to whose house 
'^slidrn?'"^ his family seems to have been for some time attached. 

And he published most of his work, the sonnets called 
Aurora and the curious Monarchical Tragedies of Cra'siis, Darius, 
Alexander, and Julius Caesar, so early that they were all done 
by 1607. He was knighted, became a member of the house- 
hold, first of Prince Henry and then of Prince Charles, had employ- 
ment in Scotland, and in 161 4 began a poem on Doomsday, which 
he afterwards continued on a scale suitable to the subject. In 162 1 
he was grantee of the whole of Nova Scotia, in 1626 Secretary for 
Scotland, and in 1633 was raised to the peerage as Viscount Stirling, 
the earldom being afterwards bestowed upon him. He died in 
London in 1640. 

Lord Stirling is a distinct Elizabethan. His strange monarchic 
tragedies were probably suggested by Fulke Greville, and their 
choruses and dedications contain much stately work. The Exhorta- 
tion to Prince Henry, which some have called his best thing, belongs 
to the same class as much of the work of Drayton, Daniel, and 
Chapman, from which Doomsday and the less portentous Jonathan 

lEd. Rogers, London, 1871. 

2 Part in Chalmers: complete, 3 vols. Glasgow, 1870. 



CHAP. VI SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE 463 

are also not far. The Aurora collection of sonnets, songs, sestines, 
elegies, etc., in the same way resembles many pieces of the lyric 
yield of the last decade of the sixteenth century, and was but a few 
years later in publication (1604). The unfortunate thing for the poet is 
that he comes extremely late, and that his by no means inconsiderable 
beauties are scattered over such an enormous mass of work as to be 
discerned and enjoyed only by an effort even more considerable. 

In this as in other respects Drummond of Hawthornden ^ had the 
advantage over his friend. He was born at the much visited and 
beautiful seat of his family, on 13th December, 1585, was educated at 
the High School and University of Edinburgh, studied 
also in France, and succeeded his father in 1610. He " """'^ 
lived for forty years after this, chiefly at his own home, marrying 
twice, but losing his first wife after a year, and remaining eighteen 
years a widower; entertaining Ben Jonson {v. supra), enjoying the 
friendship of most distinguished persons in Scotland and many in 
England. His death in 1649 is said to have been hastened by grief 
for Charles I., but he had submitted (unwillingly, it is true) to the 
Covenant. His notes of Ben Jonson's conversations have brought 
some obloquy on him, but the defence that he himself seems never to 
have intended them for publication has validity, and at the worst 
they are rather indiscreet than malevolent. Drummond was a very 
considerable man of letters, and perhaps the best-known Scottish 
poet between Dunbar and Burns. He began with elegiac verses on 
Prince Henry in 1613, and altogether left a good deal, the chief 
items being Forth Feasting;, a complimentary address to James in 
1617 on his return to Scotland; an amusing but not quite certainly 
genuine macaronic poem called Polemo-Middijiia ; a prose tract 
entitled the Cypress Grove, which is a fine piece of musical and 
melancholy Jacobean prose ; and a great number of miscellaneous 
poems, sacred and profane, sonnets, madrigals, and epigrams, trans- 
lations, elegies, hymns ; and, in short, all the miscellanea of the 
Caroline muse. 

The extreme beauty occasionally recognisable in Drummond's 
verse is marred first by a certain tone of the literary exercise, by a 
suggestion, at least as strong as in the case of his friend Alexander, 
that he would not have written if he had not had the great 
body of Elizabethan and other poetry before him ; and secondly 
(though, indeed, this is only the same fault in another form) by a 
distinct deficiency in spontaneity, ease, and flow. Yet he is a very 
charming poet, especially in his madrigals and some of his sonnets, 
possessed of an elaborate courtly grace that does not exclude passion, 

lAlso not quite completely in Chalmers. Separately by Cunningham and 
Turnbull, and in "The Musei' Library." Life by Professor Masson, 1S73. 



464 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vn 

and though never reaching the consummate expression of the best of 
his EngHsh contemporaries, yet very little behind them. 

The verses which have made the special fame of Montrose are so 
few that they need but mention ; so delightful that mention of them 
could not possibly be avoided. "Great, good, and just" and ''He 
either fears his fate too much " have secured their place and are 
never likely to be put out of it. They are contained in a hundred 
anthologies, but may be best sought in Dr. Hannah's admirable 
collection of Courtly Poets,^ which, beyond its special purpose, serves 
as a thesaurus of much occasional work of the best kind during the 
period covered by this and the two preceding Books, including the 
whole of the probable poetical work, strangely beautiful at times, of 
Sir Walter Raleigh, the graceful and interesting copies of verses 
which we owe to Wotton, and many pleasing things by Wyatt and 
Vaux, Oxford and Essex, Tichborne and Southwell, Dyer and Sandys. 

We have previously considered the reasons of the lateness of 

Scottish poetry, and incidentally those of the still greater lateness of 

Scottish prose. But no reasons, however reasonable, will ever entirely 

remove surprise that The Complaint of Scotland (1549), 

which dates from the very eve of the middle of the 

sixteenth century, should be up to the present time, and should 

have every chance of continuing to be, the earliest known original - 

work of any importance in the kind. It is not a fresh surprise 

(on the contrary, the opposite would be one) that its style is as 

antique as its date is belated. It is not merely that the '"aureate" 

term, the rhctoriqiieitr language, of the fifteenth century pervades 

and saturates it, but that the general scheme is scarcely more 

modern than — is scarcely so modern as — that of Chaucer's Boethiiis, 

more than a century and a half earlier. This curious mixture of 

archaism and pedantry continued to distinguish Scots prose until it 

ceased, as a characteristic and national language, to be written ; and 

as Professor Ker has well observed on this very subject, we see it at 

least as late as Sir Thomas Urquhart, who has it supremely. The 

CoDtplaint itself, in substance and scheme a violent 

of Scotland! diatribe against England (not surprising, inasmuch as it 

was written just after Pinkie), is treated like a prose 

Romance of the Rose so far as the tendency of the author to digress, 

divagate, and make excursions in every possible direction is con- 

1 In the " Aldine Poets," London ; constantly reprinted. 

2 There had been, of course, translations, but even these are not very early. 
Bellenden, in the early sixteenth century, was- the first important and consider- 
able translator into Scots. The standard edition of the Complaint is that of Dr. 
Murray, E.E.T.S., 1872-73. It includes some slij^htly earlier tracts. John Gau's 
Right' Way to tlw Kingdom of Heaven (ed. Mitchell, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1887) 
was translated and adapted from the Danish as early as 1533. 



SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE 465 



cernecl. The book is not solely a literary curiosity, but it is very 
mainly so. 

The Coiiiplaiiii is anonymous,^ and therefore borrows no interest 
from known or supposed authorship. The same cannot, perhaps, 
C|uite be said of the English writings of the two most famous of the 
author's countrymen and contemporaries, John Knox 
and George Buchanan."^ The piquant title of the former's Buchanan, 
principal early work, The First Blast of the Tt'innpet 
agai)ist tJie Monstrous Regime nt of Women, 1558, is the best part of 
it ; the History of the Refor?nation has something of the quaintness 
but little of the attraction of its time ; his tracts and letters have 
small literary interest. In fact, Knox was only in a very minor 
degree a man of letters at all. He was simply an ecclesiastical 
politician, using the press, which had become already one of the 
most powerful of political engines. His English writing is clear, 
vigorous, and not incorrect ; but it aims at nothing more. 

Buchanan, on the contrary, was a man of letters first of all, 
though he made a figure in politics. But his literary work was, in 
its greatest and by far its best part, written in a dead language. As 
we have seen, his own country, for fifty years and more after he was 
born, in 1506, had little or no prose literature, and her poetry was 
dropping oflf. He himself was more a Frenchman than a Scot by 
domicile for the greater part of his life, seeing that, from the time when 
as a young man he left St. Andrews till long past his fiftieth year, he, 
save for one short interval, was resident in France. His occupation 
was mainly pedagogic. Montaigne was under him at Bordeaux, 
and he wrote Latin plays and poems of real, though, even when 
every allowance is made, rather exaggerated, merit. His work in the 
vernacular is very small, and consists of political pamphlets, the chief 
of which is the savage but ingenious Chamceleon, directed with a 
certain amount of reason against Maitland of Lethington. Buchanan 
is less " aureate " than the author of the Complaint, a little more 
florid than Knox, and on the whole, as indeed we should expect, 
holds the position of something like a Scottish Ascham in style, 
though with a stiffness and tendency to pedantry which may justly be 
charged, not merely upon his own more pedantic temperament, but on 
the infinitely less advanced condition of Scots as a literary language 
when compared with English. 

The polemic temper and purpose of these men reflects itself in 

1 It has been attributed, like the Glide and Godlie Ballates, to the Dundee 
Wedderburns. 

- Mr. Arber has given The First Blast in the " English Scholar's Library," 
London, 1878. The best edition of Knox's Works is that of Laing, 6 vols. 
Edinburgh, 1846, sq. The English opiisciila of Buchanan have been edited by 
r. Hume Brown, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1S92. 



466 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vn 

most of their contemporaries and successors, and tlie wide spread of 
it may indeed be fairly charged in part with the sterility of Scots in 
literature proper. Ninian Winzet, the chief pamphleteer on the 
Roman side, is early, was a learned and ingenious writer, and con- 
trasts very favourably with his opponent Knox in tone and temper ; 
but still he is no great man of letters, nor are the Melvilles (Sir 
James, 1535-1607; Andrew, 1545-1622; James, 1556-1614), Spottis- 
woode, Baillie, and others later, such. They are interesting by their 
matter and by the racy quaintness which hardly failed any one then. 
The Rewlis and Catdelis ^ of King James have been 
ing James. ^^^^^^ referred to, and are a not unimportant document 
in the history of English criticism ; the Counterblast to Tobacco^ the 
Basilikon Doron, and the Demoiiology are known, at least by their 
titles, to all, and there is a very large residue of chiefly theological 
work. But he is only a good plain writer, not equal to his own 
recorded powers in conversation, or those lent him by the greatest 
man of letters of the nation that he first ruled. Still, Scots prose 
was to produce one last delightful example, concentrating, heightening, 
embellishing, and preserving for ever all its own most racy character- 
istics, in Sir Thomas Urquhart,- Knight of Cromarty, and, 
Ur^'har"^ in far other sense than most of us, a descendant in lineal 
and specified genealogy from Adam. He was born in 
1605, took a strong part on the Royalist side, shared in the " Trot of 
Turriff," was knighted in 1641, fought at Worcester, and died just at 
the moment of the Restoration. His known work consists of a trans- 
lation of Rabelais and of several most singular tractates on mathe- 
matics, linguistics, and what not, with wonderful Greek compound titles, 
and written in a language which is ILupJmes and Sir Thomas Browne 
rolled into one, and extra-illustrated by national and personal 
peculiarities. It is impossible to read Urquhart without conceiving 
a strong liking for the man and a great admiration for his literary 
powers ; but it must be admitted that it was well he left \.o 
school. 

lEd. Arber, with Gascoigne's Steel Glass, etc. Not much else has been 
recently reprinted. 

2 There is, unluckily, no complete edition of Urquhart. The Ralielais has 
been often reprinted; the Maitland Club collected liis quaint treatises, Trisso- 
tetras, Logopaiidcctcis'ton , etc. ; but there is said to be other unprinted matter. In 
fuller space the historian Pitscottie, the collectors Maitland and Bannatyne (more 
precious to literature than many men of letters), Scot of Scotstarvet, Mure of 
Rowallan, Alexander Hume, and Robert Ker, Earl of Ancrum (known by one 
fine sonnet), could claim notice, and even here they claim mention. 



INTERCHAPTER VII 

The present Interchapter must be so contrived as to pay a double 
debt, and to summarise not merely the Caroline sub-period but the 
entire literary age which is still, and justly, called Elizabethan by 
those who are not studious of innovation for innovation's sake. 

In the first respect our recapitulation in the three kinds should 
have been made unusually easy by the chapters which have gone 
before. In all three the mark, if not of decadence — that is a dangerous 
word — yet of completion of phase, is very distinct. There is not a touch 
of it, save for the most unessential things, in Milton ; but then Milton is 
one of those examples which come, fortunately, from time to time, to 
prove the folly of any strict " evolution " theory in letters, and the superi- 
ority of a theory of revolution tempered by permanence. He dwells 
apart ; but the rest, whether poets, prose-writers, or dramatists, tell of 
the future as much by their excellences as by their shortcomings. 
For dehght Caroline poetry, in the characteristic form of it, has few 
superiors ; but no one who keeps his critical head can say that its 
charms have not a touch of the morbid. They consist in extreme 
strangeness, in quintessenced and preternatural art, rather than in the 
direct and simple appeal in transcendence to nature. We would not 
lose them for anything; but we feel that they are something of the 
kind of Ninon de Lenclos, their contemporary, who fascinated the 
grandsons of her first admirers. And then, side by side with them, 
there is the phenomenon, never known except in periods of eclipse, 
of a quite different school growing and flourishing. In these things 
there is no possibility of mistake. The fear or hope of change is 
hardly even perplexing, it is so clear. 

The same signs present themselves in drama, but more unmis- 
takably still, and with far less of compensation. Once more, we 
would not lose the best plays written after the accession of Charles I., 
but the loss would by no means be the occasion of such grief 
as we should feel if we had known and were suddenly, by some 
malignant power, forced to forget, except in vague recall of their 
charm, Herrick and Marvell, Crashaw and Carew. In this kind 

467 



468 CAROLINE Lll'EKATURE book 

the sudden flight compensates less ; and here — - as not in poetry — we 
look in vain for any promise of a new style to take the place of that 
which is failing. Jonson and Chapman and Dekker belong to a far 
earlier time ; Massinger and ford and Shirley, despite the ambition 
of the second and the industrious talent of the other two, leave us 
partly cold ; and there are no others that rise beyond a very moderate 
second class. Above all, the inability to raise any new form in 
drama, and the quite shocking la.xity of the verse in which most of what 
is written shows itself, reconcile us to closing the chapter. When a 
man of undoubted talent like Davenant succumbs in this way there is 
clearly something wrong ; but when a man who is at least parcel- 
genius like Suckling, who can write other verse quite excellently, 
follows suit, then no further doubt is possible : it is time for this 
kind of drama to go. 

The phenomena of prose are not entirely different, but show them- 
selves in a different and much more satisfactory way. Here also we 
see that there is a necessity, if only a temporary necessity, for a 
change. Prose — "the instrument of the average purpose" — has got 
very ill fitted indeed for any such thing. It has become, save in the 
hands of Hobbes, nearly incapable of directness, of plain busine.ss- 
like treatment. The protest which, as we shall see, was made in the 
beginning of the new period by Sprat was justified absolutely so far as 
the mere business requirements of the matter went, and was not 
entirely without justification even from the point of view of belles 
Idtres. A general theory of style which could allow even Milton 
constantly to spoil his sentence, and which could not shepherd even 
Clarendon from wandering inextricably into a cnl-dc-sac at every 
few pages, obviously required at least the provision of something 
alternative if not an utter reformation. 

Yet here the actual condition of things provided condolences and 
vails of such magnificent quality that those are almost to be excused 
who would have had no reform at all. An English literature without 
Sir Thomas Browne is a thing so impoverished as to be appalling to 
think of, and the loss of Taylor and Milton in his prose, of Fuller and 
the not yet mentioned Glanville, and of not a few minors, would still 
be a hideous deprivation. Even these minors, and still more the 
eccentricities of the Urquhart type, have an engagingness which we 
look for in vain from Dryden to Southey ; while the great men of the 
time are simply unmatchable in any language. The close of the 
Apology itself is a very little, though only a very little, inferior to 
the close of the Hydriotaphia. 

Nor must we forget that this incomparable descant is the Ite 
mjssa est of something more than Caroline prose or Caroline litera- 
ture — it is that of the whole great Elizabethan period. That 



INTERCH AFTER VII 469 



period from beginning to end covered just eiglity years — an ordinary 
lifetime; indeed, Hobbes was born less than ten years after its 
beginning and outlived its close by nearly twenty. Yet into this 
ordinary lifetime it had compressed the literary events of a dozen 
ordinary generations. It had found English literature with scarcely 
more than one name which could pretend to the first class, with 
very few of the second, with but a scanty battalion of distinguished 
known writers, with a body of work, anonymous and assigned, wliich 
in its more notable examples would fill but a very small bookcase, 
with the list of styles and kinds either full of blanks or completed 
only by experiments and rough sketches, the great department of 
drama having nothing to show but these. It left a mighty library 
full of masterpieces, with the figures of Spenser and Shakespeare 
among dead, and those of Milton and Browne among living, men, 
showing as but the captains of scores and hundreds of poets and 
prose-writers and dramatists of almost every kind. Not one single 
department of literature except the prose novel was now in a rudi- 
mentary condition, and no language was in this respect better off 
than our own. In not a single kind were we now unfurnished with 
champions whom we could oppose to the greatest of any literature, 
ancient or modern. 

This vast overrunning of the literary territory, this tumultuous 
peopling of the literary solitudes, is, no doubt, the chief general 
phenomenon of the time, and its minor phenomena should have been 
almost sufficiently indicated in the divisional summaries and the text 
which supports them. In all departments we can indeed observe 
(taking care not to make the generalisations too strict) a character of 
more or less playful exuberance in the strictly Elizabethan part, of 
recollection and sober weighty thought in the Jacobean, and a 
further stage either of sheer extravagance, of melancholy mysticism, 
or of quintessenced, artificial, very slightly frivolous, grace in the 
Caroline ; but these notes must not be forced. We can see the 
vast importance of the period in prosody, with Spenser reshaping, and 
to a great extent fixing, poetic diction and its sound value ; with Shake- 
speare and the dramatists loosening and suppling versification to the 
utmost possible extent ; and with Milton on one side and the early 
coupleteers on the other preventing it from becoming simply lawless. 
We see the Euphuist protest against want of colour in prose, at first 
merely fantastic and bizarre, losing little of its fantasy, but acquiring 
gravity, harmony, weight, in Jacobean hands, and at last giving us 
the unsurpassable majesty and sweetness at once of the great prose- 
writers of the middle of the century. The essay makes its appear- 
ance, and spreads itself subtly, and under all manner of disguises, in 
many directions. Lyric poetry of the true song-kind attains a 



470 CAROLINE LITERATURE book \h 

luxuriance and a charm never before and seldom since attained. 
The sermon becomes one not merely of the great instnmients of 
religion, but of the great achievements of literature ; the masque, a 
graceful if artificial and short-lived kind, comes into bloom. History 
and philosophy, cultivated sparingly before, receive consummate treat- 
ment at the hands of Hobbes and Clarendon. Above all, the drama, 
so long postponed, finds, in the course of a few years, expression in 
almost every possible variety, and, though it still has a sort of after- 
piece or set of afterpieces to present in Restoration comedy and the 
heroic drama, runs nearly its full course. 

If in such an abundance, such a riot almost, the principles of 
measure, of order, of limit, are not always sufficiently attended to, there 
can be little wonder. They could be, for a time at least, very willingly 
spared ; they would almost certainly have deprived us of more than 
they could have given ; and those who regard them with special 
affection will not find reason to complain of their too sparing presence 
for something like 150 years, which now lie before us in the periods of 
the two followintj Books. 



BOOK VIII 

THE AUGUSTAN AGES 
CHAPTER I 

THE AGE OF DRYDEN — POETRY 

The term "Augustan" — Its use here — Dryden — His life — His earlier poems — 
The satires, etc. — ^The Fables — His verse — Butler — Restoration lyric — 
Satires of Marvell and Oldham 

Industrious attempts have been made to trace the origin of the 
phrase Augustan age in reference to Enghsh literature. The phrase 
itself has not always been used with the same denotation, being 
sometimes applied to the whole period during which 
Pope wrote, sometimes limited to the reign of Queen "Aim,su'n." 
Anne, and sometimes extended backwards so as to in- 
clude Dryden. This last seems the best use if the term — which is a 
convenient one and not erroneous except by intention — be employed 
at all. For it connects itself well with Johnson's famous comparison 
of Dryden's dealings with the English language and literature to 
those of Augustus with the city of Rome, which he '' found of brick 
and left of marble." We do not nowadays consider Shakespeare 
brick or Rowe marble ; but that does not matter. 

What is beyond controversy is that a change of the widest and 
deepest kind passed not merely over but through English literature, 
at a time corresponding almost exactly with the Restoration, and in 
consequence of influences of which for all but forty years 
Dryden was the supreme literary exponent — that the kind 
of literature then produced received its greatest polish, and came 
nearest to its own ideal, in some forty years more to the death of 
Pope — that for a further period of not quite sixty years it was in 
office, though it was gradually losing power — and that it was driven 

471 



472 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

from both, after a preliminary summons to depart in the Lyrical 
Ballads of 1798, by the triumph of Romanticism in tlie early years of 
the nineteenth century. The history of this literature will occupy us 
during this Book and the next, and the present may best be occupied 
with the Augustan period, in the wide sense, of Dryden, Pope, and 
their times. 

The causes and necessity of the change have been indicated 
already ; the course of it must occupy us here. Nor perhaps in 
any period is one single figure so prominent and exemplary as in the 
first part of this. Pope was nearly approached by others, 
and his greatness was in poetry alone, for he scarcely 
touched drama, and though a good prose-writer, was only such for 
pastime. But Dryden was the greatest poet of his own day and 
style by such a distance that no second can be placed to him. 
He was the chief agent in the shaping and in the popularising of 
the new prose. And if one or two tragedies of others have been 
thought, and several comedies certainly are, better than any play of 
his, yet no one did both so well, while he also exceeds all in the 
volume of his dramatic work and in the variety of its forms. 

John Dryden 1 was born in 1631 at Aldwinkle All Saints in 
Northamptonshire, of a family which certainly came from the North, • 
and perhaps from beyond the Border, but which had been settled 
„. ... for some time in its actual position with estates and a 
baronetcy. He was educated at Westminster, and at 
Trinity College, Cambridge. His connections on both sides were 
Puritan and Parliamentary, and his uncle on the mother's side, Sir 
Gilbert Pickering, was a close friend of the Protector, whose death 
Dryden celebrated in verse. But it is certain that he could never 
have been an anti-Royalist at heart ; and when the Restoration came 
he celebrated that too with as much good-will as vigour. We know 
extremely little of his beginnings in literature; but in 1663, having 
succeeded to a small property, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, 
eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and very soon afterwards 
was in active practice as a playwright. In 1670 he was made Poet- 
Laureate and Historiographer Royal in succession, respectively, to 
Davenant and Howell, but for ten years more he wrote little but 
plays. The ferments of the Popish Plot induced his great ])olitical 
satires. He had a pension in addition to his salaries, and his 
enemies have held that interest decided his change of religion when 
James II. succeeded to the throne and began proselytising. This 
imputation is not only ungenerous but improbable. Dryden did 

iThe standard edition of Dryden is Scott's (18 vols.), which has been re- 
edited, with a few additions and corrections, })v the present writer. Mr. Christie's 
" Globe " edition of the Poems is not likely soon to Ije superseded. 



CHAr. I THE AGE OF DRYDEN — POETRY 473 

much poorly paid work for the court, drudging at translations and 
writing The Hind and the Panther (the greatest poem ever written in 
the teeth of its subject), and when the Revolution came he was faithful 
to his cause, and lost everything but his small private fortune. He 
returned to play-writing, and after a time made inadequate but not 
inconsiderable gains by his translation of Virgil. His last and 
ahnost his best work was contained in the volume of Fables, which 
was published (i 699-1 700) very shortly before his death, from 
mortification of the toe due to gout, on ist May 1700. He had 
three sons, the youngest of whom succeeded to the baronetcy. 
Dryden's change of faith, the questionable shape of a good deal of 
his dramatic writing, and other things, have caused controversy about 
his private character ; but all the available evidence leaves him a 
very fair specimen of humanity, amiable in private life, extraordinarily 
modest and generous to others m literary matters^ a hard worker, 
sturdy in resisting misfortune, frank in confessing his own faults, and 
chargeable with very few except the coarseness and the adulation 
which were characteristic, not of his own personality, but of the 
manners of the time. 

His intellectual and literary greatness have seldom been denied, 
though estimates of them have, of course, varied. He did not show 
his great powers very early, and indeed the amount of work that we 
have from him till after his thirtieth year is extremely small. As a 
boy he contributed to the already mentioned volume of funeral poems 
on his schoolfellow, Lord Hastings, a piece in the most extravagant 
"metaphysical" style, but not without cleverness; his Heroic 
Stanzas on Cromwell's death (again showing careful attention to the 
fashion of the time in their choice of the quatrain metre of Gondibert') 
are stiff and unequal but fine in parts, and already display a certain 
craftsmanship which is very rare in the work of a beginner. 

The group of his poems on the Restoration — Astrcea Redux, a 
poem on the Coronation, and one to Clarendon — is of singular inter- 
est. All three are written in the couplet, the metre that Dryden was 
born — not exactly to introduce, seeing that it had been 
introduced in its new form by Waller and others before '^poems"^'^ 
he was born, but — to strengthen, to perfect, and to instal 
in public favour for something like a century and a half. He is not 
yet at his best in it, or at anything near his best. His touch is un- 
sure ; his sense is sometimes not quite clear ; and he is often driven 
to clumsy inversions in order to get it expressed and concluded in 
the distich. But the inimitable ring which distinguishes his verse 
from all others — the ring as of a great bronze coin thrown down on 
marble — appears already, with something of the command of easy 
stately phrase and very much of the " energy divine " which was 



474 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

justly attributed to him by his best pupil. In his next, and for 
many years only, important poem he relapsed into the quatrain. 
Annus Mirabilis (1666) is a poem which might be taken as a text 
or series of texts to show the difference between the old poetry and 
the new. The form is against it; the quatrain is meditative and 
impressionist, not historic. There are queer lapses into the meta- 
physical, oscillations between bombast and bathos, which had better 
not be there. And yet, as distinctly, though after a very different 
fashion, as in the almost contemporary Paradise Lost itself, there is 
the "wind of the spirit," the power of transforming, the evidence of 
command of that mysterious instrument, the measured word. It is a 
proof of the greatness of Dryden that he knew JMilton for a poet ; it 
is a proof of the smallness (and mighty as he was on some sides, on 
others he was very small) of Milton that (if he really did so) he 
denied poetry to Dryden. 

Then, for fifteen years and more, Dryden did nothing of impor- 
tance in pure poetry, and his drama — verse and other — will be handled 
two chapters hence. He broke out again with the marvellous group 

of satires above referred to — Absalom and Achitophel 
satSetc. (^'ai't I-> November 1681), The Medal (March 1682), 

MacFlccknoe (October 1682), and the second part of 
Absalom and AcJiitopIiel (with important contributions from Dryden, 
though the whole is not his), a month later, with Religio Laid almost 
at the same moment. In these poems Dryden showed himself in a 
light which, though not perhaps surprising to careful students of his 
plays, could hardly have been anticipated by any one who knew his 
earlier poems only. In mere subject not one of the group is ab- 
solutely original — originality of the obvious kind is not Dryden's forte. 
But in the treatment, the form, the real essence of them, few things 
more original have ever been seen in English literature. His long 
practice in rhyming plays had given him an absolute command of the 
form of couplet, of which in the Restoration group his grasp had 
been uncertain, and a secure handling of tlie widest diversity of sul:)- 
jects in verse. Nobody — hardly even Lucretius — has ever argued in 
verse like Dryden ; few have understood the ordontiance of a verse- 
narrative as he has. But over and above these gifts. Nature had 
endowed him with a still more special faculty for satiric and didactic 
verse — the faculty of keeping himself thoroughly above his subject in 
the sense of command. Dryden has been strangely called " phleg- 
matic," from the cool superiority which he observes in dealing with 
the most exciting themes. He is in reality no more phlegmatic than 
Shakespeare himself, though he is a lesser poet with lesser range. 
The phlegm of the great passage on Life in Aurengzcbc, of the 
"wandering fires" in TJie Hind and the Panther, to mention no 



THE AGK OF DRYDEN — TOETRY 475 



others, is a very curious humour; and it were much to be wished 
that more poets would run such humours upon us. But Dryden was 
not lightly moved by light things ; and while his adversaries howled 
and gnashed and gesticulated, he swam steadily above on an easy 
wing pouring molten iron upon them. The controversial verse of 
Religio Laid, with its tell-tale yearning for an infallible director, is 
less popular than the great satiric portraits of the Absalom pieces, Tlie 
Medal, and MacFlecknoe, but it is not less good. Perhaps the very 
best of all — magnificent as are the " Zimri," the " Og," the " Doeg," 
and the whole of MacFlecknoe — is the "Shimei" (Slingsby Bethel) of 
the first Absalom. Nowhere else is the easy wing-stroke of the 
couplet, at once propelling the poet through upper air and slapping 
his victim in the face at every beat, so triumphantly and coolly 
manifested. These things belong, no doubt, to one of the outlying 
districts of poetry, but poetry they are. 

The Hind and the Panther in strictness belongs to this series of 
poems, and despite the not altogether happy and, at the time, much 
ridiculed adaptation of the beast-fable to the controversies of the 
day, and the extreme weakness of the central argument, it contains 
some of Uryden's very finest things — the magnificent Con/iteor above 
referred to being perhaps the best of the set passages, and the 
description of the Panther (the Church of England) — who 

Had more of Lion in her than to fear — 

the best perhaps of the single lines. But it was preceded and 
followed by much less happy compositions, on two of which the curse 
of Laureate verse lies something heavily — Threnodia Ai/gi/stalis, a 
Pindaric on the death of Charles II., and Britannia Rediviva, a poem 
in couplets on the birth of the luckless Old Chevalier. Yet even in 
these the magical beauty of Dryden's verse appears. 

For some ten years after -the Revolution Dryden was too much 
occupied with hackwork of various kinds — the chief being the Virgil'^ 
— to produce much original, or even semi-original, poetry ; but his 
genius happily inspired him, just before he died, to give 
the most striking proof ever given by any poet that age 
and ill-health and the unkindness of circumstance had not affected 
his absolute pre-eminence over all his fellows. The so-called Fables 
were chiefly made up of some remarkable parajDhrases — Dryden 
himself, with more modesty, called them "translations " — from Chaucer 

1 He had begun the practice of translation, chiefly in a series of Miscellanies 
by hiriiself and others, even before the great satires, and did, besides the Virgil 
(1697), much of Juvenal (1693) ^"d a good deal of Ovid and Lucretius, with some 
Horace and Homer. It is very great work in its kind of loose ti-anslation-para- 
phrase : but one had so much rather have the originals ! 



476 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

and Boccaccio. But they also contained an exquisite dedication to 
the Duchess of Ormond, some lines of which are the very flower of 
Dryden's magnificent versification ; a very fine address to his cousin, 
John Driden (the name had been very variously spelt, and the 
cousins retained diiferent forms ), whose still living sister Honor had 
been his own first love ; Alexander's Feast, and other capital things. 
Macaulay, who, though politically and morally unjust to Dryden, 
retained the eighteenth-century admiration for his literary genius 
(which had been authenticated by the great Whig authority of Fox), 
has put the merits of the book with equal brevity, force, and truth in 
describing its verses as " such as no other living man could have 
written." 

We must define and emphasise this a little, for it is one of the 

most important points of this history. When Johnson, not in the 

Life of Milton but elsewhere, says that that poet ought not to be 

blamed for harshness, for he wrote as well as his time 

IS verse, .y^^^yj^j allow, and would no doubt have written more 
smoothly if he had written after Dryden, too many people nowadays 
laugh with pity or derision, as the case may be. Johnson is indeed 
quite indefensible, not in preferring Dryden's verse to Milton's — for 
the things are incommensurable, and if a man cannot enjoy both and 
can enjoy one he takes the benefit of the statute De Cnstibiis — but 
as making a very gross historical error. Milton's versification is 
not of an older stamp than Dryden's ; it might even plead that it is 
younger, seeing that while Dryden's verse is now obsolete, the other 
is still fresh. The two are not older or younger, reformed or unre- 
formed, better or worse — they are different ; they represent two inde- 
pendent developments of the same really earlier stage, the full-blown 
undisciplined blank verse of the middle and later dramatists, coming 
as it did on the heels of, or simultaneously with, the varied stanza 
metres of which the Spenserian is at once the great original and the 
unquestioned chief, and the loose enjambed couplet of which we find 
the last notable example in Chamberlayne. Milton, especially devoting 
himself to the good sides of these various lawlessnesses, created, to an 
extent not surpassed or sensibly enlarged to the present day, a form 
of blank verse at once infinitely various and extremely precise, 
capable, by the further elaboration of the verse-paragraph, of being 
made to subserve almost every purpose of poetry except the lyrical. 
Dryden, revolting from the bad sides, and following the school of 
Waller, rejected blank verse for a time even for dramatic purposes 
(though in this he recanted), rejected it almost entirely for non- 
dramatic purposes, and produced a form of the couplet which, if not 
the best vehicle conceivable for all kinds of poetry, was at any rate a 
splendid carroccio for invective, for argument, and for narrative. He 



CHAP. I THE AGE OF DRYDEN — POETRY 477 

could do much else. His little-read lyrics in the plays, and a few out 
of them, have extraordinary variety, and sometimes come not far 
short of the earlier Caroline charm. His Pindarics (the best of 
which is the unequal, but in parts unequalled, Ode to the Pious 
Memory of AIj's. Anne Killigreixi) have almost limitless majesty and 
no small grace. But his couplet — the couplet which he left to none, 
for Pope, not being able to follow, diverged — is undoubtedly his great 
title to fame. 

For this, or for some other reason, it has been the fashion for a 
century to call him prosaic. " The most prosaic of ovu- great 
poets," " a classic of our prose," and the like, are the judgments of 
critics who have not the excuse of the first revolters from his tradi- 
tion. This is idle. If the best things in even the Restoration 
pieces and Annus Mh-abilis and the Conquest of Granada^ much 
more the Aurengsebe patch and the Hind and Patither act of humilia- 
tion, and the opening of Religio Laici, and the address to *' The 
daughter of the Rose whose cheeks unite The differing titles of the Red 
and White," as well as a hundred hardly lesser things — the songs in 
T/ie Indian Emperor and (Ediptis and Marriage a la Mode, the 
singing flames in which Shadwell and Settle roast for ever — if these 
things be prose, why, then, we must really have a new dictionary, 
and poetry, hard enough to define as it is, will become more impos- 
sible of definition than ever. If there is not in these things the 
transformation and sublimation, by the use of metrical language, 
of ideas so that they remain for ever fitted to transport and inspire, 
then such transformation and sublimation are nowhere ; they cannot, 
on anything but an unsafe criterion of will-worship and private judg- 
ment, be said to be in the Tempest, in Coiniis, in Adonais, in La Belle 
Dame sans Merci. The administration is dilTerent, but the spirit is 
the same. 

We shall not use such language again in the present chapter. 
Dryden was not a prosaic poet, but he was a poet of a prosaic time. 
Nor perhaps does this appear anywhere more distinctly than in the 
work of Samuel Butler,^ whose life was about the same 
length,- since, though . nearly twenty years older than 
Dryden, he died just twenty years before him. He was a native of 
Worcestershire, where he was born at Strensham in 1612. He was 
educated at the cathedral school of the diocese, but he went to no 
university. Although details about him, till his death in 1680, are not 
exactly scanty, they are not very informing, and are sometimes rather 
contradictory. During the greater part of his life he seems to have 

1 Poems, ed. R. B. Johnson (" Aldine Poets ") , 2 vols. London, 1893. The prose 
part of Thyer's Genuine Remains needs reprinting, with the MS. now in the British 
Museum. Morley's Seventeenth Century Characters gives some. 



478 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viit 

filled quasi-official or ministerial positions in the households of divers 
public or private persons, and it was pretty certainly in one of these 
that he picked up the facts for Hudibras. After the publication and 
popularity of that great satire he seems to have been a disappointed 
man, but even tradition makes himself to blame. The first part of 
Hudibras was published in 1662, the second next year, the third not 
till fifteen years afterwards. He published little else in his lifetime, 
and the so-called "posthumous works" are certainly for the most 
part spurious. But nearly eighty years after his death, in 1759, Mr. 
Thyer, Chetham Librarian at Manchester, issued Genuine Remains, 
which have an authentic pedigree from Butler's friend Longueville, 
and would authenticate themselves without any. 

Butler, by some direct and fairly trustworthy evidence and a 
consensus of tradition, is said to have been of a saturnine and rather 
disobliging temperament, which indeed is pretty obvious in his work. 
But there is absolutely no reason to suppose that Hudibras is animated 
by personal spite at his hosts, masters, or companions during the 
Commonwealth. Every trait, though exaggerated for the particular 
purpose, is historically justified. It is clear that Butler, though by no 
means a very fervid pietist or "high-flying" Cavalier, was a convinced 
opponent of irregular '* enthusiasm " in religion, and popular license 
in the State ; and the whole piece is treated with a largeness of 
handling irreconcilable with the idea of a petty wiping off of private 
grudges. He was evidently a born satirist, whose satire was not, like 
Dryden's, merely one development of an almost universal faculty of 
literary craftsmanship ; not, like Swift's later, a vain attempt to relieve 
the passionate melancholy and the " savage indignation " excited 
by the riddles of the painful earth. It was the offspring of a keen 
intelligence, a not too amiable temper, and one form of the hard, prac- 
tical, businesslike mood which was seizing the nation after its century 
of heroic flights. His minor poems, "The Elephant in the Moon," 
the piece to the Royal Society (then new, and much rallied by the 
wits), his "Claude Duval" ode, his cFelightful dialogue of Cat and 
Puss ridiculing the heroic plays, and many of the meditative scraps, 
are excellent ; but for posterity he is the author of Hudibras. 

This curious composition, in about ten thousand octosyllabic 
lines, takes its ostensible theme, the adventures and misadventures of 
Sir Hudibras and his man Ralpho, from Don Quixote, and some 
things in its manner from the great French prose satire of the end 
of the sixteenth century, the Satyre iMenippee, but in its real essence 
is quite original. The story, though some of its incidents and 
episodes are amusing, and have fixed themselves in the general 
memory, is of no importance ; we can see that the author neither 
cared about it himself nor expected his readers to care. The 



CHAP. I THE AGE OF DRYDEN — POETRY 479 

characters, though trouble was taken to identify them, are types and 
nothing more. But the whole is so constructed as to pour a steady 
shower of pitiless ridicule on the Parliamentary party, and as this 
exactly suited the taste of the nation, which was rejoicing in its 
freedom from the sometimes bloodthirsty and always teasing tyrants 
who had domineered over it, the popularity of the piece is readily 
enough understood, while its great human wisdom and concentrated, 
if not very exalted, power of thought have made it matter for more 
than a time. It is indeed of the class of work which, as has been said 
of something else, "invariably displeases fools," and sometimes men 
like Samuel Pepys, who are not to be so called. Its bitterness is 
too cutting for some tastes ; its grotesque bewilders or disgusts 
feeble folk. Butler is, in fact, a true "metaphysical" in the way in 
which he produces, and heaps in the strangest juxtapositions, endless 
scraps of lore and quips of fancy ; but there is more of the coming 
than of the passing time in the intense common sense which under- 
lies, and (at no great height certainly) overarches, all his erudition 
and all his wit. His form too is of the most notable, and is a sort of 
companion species-by-itself to that of Skelton. The octosyllable, 
though capable of great melody, had always been a light and skipping 
form, but he taught it quite a new pace. There is nothing before 
that resembles, while everything of tlie kind that comes after imitates, 
the Hudibrastic couplet, now soberly plodding in designed doggerel to 
suit the sense, and now lifting itself into a sort of pirouette with one 
of the wonderful final rhymes which have impressed themselves more 
than anything else on the popular remembrance. The verse of 
Butler is scorn made metrical. 

Among the few poets who must be mentioned here with Dryden, 
the group of belated and slightly degraded Caroline songsters holds the 
most important place. It consists of three " persons of quality," the 
Earl of Dorset, Lord Rochester, and Sir Charles Sedley, of one 
ancestress of the modern lady-journalist, Afra Behn, and of a vague 
and shifting body of men of letters, who sometimes were able to do 
charming things, and generally did things anything but charming. 
Even Flatman, even Bancks, could sometimes turn out a song or a 
copy of verses with something of the fine rapture, with a good deal of 
the careless-ordered ease, which charm us in their predecessors on 
the other side of "the flood." But -even the active and loving 
efforts of Mr. Bullen and others have not extracted from them any- 
thing equal to the best things of Dorset, Rochester, Sedley, and 
"Astraea," and they must therefore be regretfully excluded from a 
Short History. 

A paragraph will give the history of the four excepted persons, 
and another must suffice for their works. Charles Sackville, sixth 



48o THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 



Earl of Dorset (the holders of the title had changed rapidly since his 
greater poetical ancestor received it, not three-quarters of a century 
before he succeeded), was born in 1637, not thirty years after the 
death of the author of Gorboduc, and, as Lord Buckhurst, was known 
not too creditably in the early days of the Restoration, though Dryden's 
Essay of Dramatic Foesy shows how deep his interest in literature 
even then was. The tyranny, perhaps not more than the stupidity, of 
James II. sent him into opposition, and he became a great Williamite, 
but always was faithful to Dryden. He died in 1706, last, though 
born first, of the four. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, a still better 
wit and poet, was a worse man, being a coward, spiteful, and in almost 
every way ungenerous. He was born in 1647, and educated at 

Wadham College, Oxford, came to court as quite a boy, 
^%°r'ic'.'°" played the typical Restoration bully and rake in all 

points but spirit for some fifteen years, and died just 
after his three-and-thirtieth birthday, after being, it is said, converted 
by Burnet. Sedley, a better poet than Dorset, and not quite so bad 
a man as Rochester, was born at Aylesford in 1639. was like Wilmot 
a Wadham man, figured in Charles's court and in outside orgies with 
Buckhurst, accepted '• Revolution principles," less it would seem from 
patriotism than from a grudge at James for having debauched his 
daughter, the witty and ugly Countess of Dorchester (Dorset's 
Dorinda), and died in 1701. Afra, Aphra, Aphara, or Ayfara Behn 
is said to have been born at Wye near Ashford in 1640, but her 
history is most imperfectly known. She went to Guiana somehow, 
married a Dutch mercliant, was a widow at six-and-twenty, wrote both 
plays and novels, which will appear in the next two chapters, and 
died in 1689.^ 

This quartette lives and will live by songs, not always graceful in 
any sense, nearly always graceless in one particular ; but of wonder- 
ful ease, air, and fire. Dorset's universally known "To all you ladies 
now on land," and his less popular '■'■ Phyllis, for shame," with certain 
charming epigrams and snatches, the most agreeable of all, if not the 
most correct, being that in praise of " Bonny Black Bess," have an 
amiable and careless facility which is extremely pleasing. Rochester, 
many of whose pieces, genuine or attributed, are so foul that they 
never appear in any decent collection, has left others of somewhat 
ill-natured and rather roughly expressed, but singularly shrewd 
criticism, and a handful of really exquisite songs, " I cannot change 
as others do," " My dear Mistress has a heart," '•' Absent from thee 
I languish still," "When on these lovely looks I gaze," "An age in 

1 Dorset and the producible poems of Rochester are in Chalmers; there are 
two last-century collections of Sedley's work; and that of Afra Behn has been 
reprinted in 6 vols. London, 1871. 



CHAP. I THE AGE OF DRYD EN — POETRY 481 

her embraces past," and a few others, while he is at least the 
acknowledged father of the best epigram in the English language — 

Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King. 

Sedley (often spelt "S/dley" at the time) has fewer good things, but 
the splendid opening of one of his pieces — 

Love still has something of the sea, 
From whence his mother rose, 

is not ill followed up, and " Phillis is my only joy," the " Knotting Song," 
and others rank very high ; while Mrs. Behn provides at least one — 

Love in fantastic triumph sat — 

of quite bewildering beauty, suggesting the idea that some imp of 
poetry must have determined to upset all generalisations as to the 
verse of the time by inspiring it. Yet " Oh love that stronger art 
than wine " and others are not much below it. These pieces, with a 
few from the lesser hands glanced at above, are memorable as the last 
echoes of the marvellous song concert of the tirst half of the century. 
After the deaths of Dryden and Sedley in 1700 and 1701, a hundred 
years passed without anything like them ; nor perhaps has the gift been 
quite recovered since. 

Apart from these, from Dryden and Butler, and from the survivors 
of the elder age, whether vocal like Milton or silent like Herrick, not 
merely the five-and-twenty years of Charles's reign, but the seventeen 
of his brother's, and of that of William and Mary, are woefully 
barren of poetry. The satiric impulse which produced through 
Dryden the greatest verse-work of the time, in the others chiefly served 
to show by how far Dryden himself outtopped his fellows. The satires 
attributed to Marvell — divers " Instructions " and gatires of 
" Advices to a Painter," " Britannia and Raleigh," Marvell and 
"Dialogue between Two Horses," etc. — are partisan lam- '^™' 

poons of extraordinary ferocity and not devoid of real vigour, but for 
the most part clumsy in form, following, whether designedly or not, the 
roughness of Donne, and never advancing beyond Cowley or Waller. 
John Oldham ^ enjoys a sort of traditional fame (due to his period, 
his early death, and the magnificent eulogy of Dryden) which he 
could liardly keep if many people read him. He was born near 
Tetbury in 1653, and went to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he 
took his degree in 1674. He became usher in a school at Croydon, 
where Dorset, Rochester, and Sedley are said to have visited him, 
having been struck by his verses. They, or other patrons, recom- 

1 Not in Chalmers, but very frequently reprinted in the I^te seventeenth cen- 
tury. Also ed. Bell, London, 1854. I use the sixth edition, 1703. 
2 1 



.l82 THE AUGUSTAN AGES 



mended him to tutorships, and he died of the smallpox at Lord 
Kingston's seat of Holme Pierrepoint, aged barely thirty. His chief 
work was a satire, or rather several sat'ires, on the Jesuits, which fed 
or caught the flame of the Popish Plot madness in 1679 i '^"'1 ^e 
wrote many other odes, satires, and translations. The roughness 
characteristic of Marvell is noticeable also in him, but he had learnt 
from Dryden's plays (he had no time to learn from his satires) to 
clench the couplet with a good liammer-stroke at the end. 

It is to be feared that the delusion that decency and dulness are 
somehow inseparably connected may have been favoured by Pope's 
well-known compliment to Wentworth Dillon, Lord Roscommon : ^ — 

In Charles's days, 
Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays; 

for the absence of spot is about the only merit about them. The 
Essay on Translated Verse, which has given him an easy fame, is a 
very respectable exercise in a kind of couplet which, early as it is 
(written 1670, printed 1680), has already made great progress from 
the massive vigour of Dryden to the smoother but weaker elegance 
of Pope ; the rest of him is negligible. Another noble bard of the 
time, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave and Duke of Buckinghamshire, 
wrote couplets inferior to Roscommon's, and lyrics very inferior to 
Rochester's, yet some of these latter are not despicable. An Essay 
on Satire, which is attributed to the joint efforts of Mulgrave and 
Dryden, is too rude, as well as mostly too rough, for tlie poet, and too 
clever for the peer ; it contains perhaps the best satiric couplet in 
the English language, outside of Dryden and Pope — 

Was ever prince by two at once misled, 
False, foolish, old, ill-natured, and ill-bred? 

the '^ two " being the Duchesses of Cleveland and Portsmouth. 

The strange encomium of Johnson on T/ie Choice of Thomas Pom- 
fret has excited the wonder of at least three generations, and nothing 
else of his has even titular fame. Stepney, a diplomatist and a 
translator, has left little to repay the explorer of him ; the four 
monosyllables, King, Smith, Duke, and Sprat, less ; " Granville the 
polite," least. But that friend of Dryden and Pope who is yoked 
in the latter's couplet as ''knowing" with Granville, William Walsh, 
rises at intervals (especially in " Jealousy " and the quaint "■ Despairing 
Lover") above his dreary class. His thought has the unconventionality 
of the earlier time, and his expression, though very unequal, is some- 
times not unworthy of it. 

1 Roscommon, with all who follow, will be found in Chalmers. The State 
Poems, 3 vols. 1697-1704, contain much notalDle work of this time, in a range 
beyond their title. 



CHAPTER II 

THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 

The stage at the Restoration — The Heroic play — Dryden's comedies — Etherege — 
Shadwell — Sedley — Mrs. Behn — Wycherley — The Rehearsal — The great 
artificial comedy — Congreve — Vanbrugh — Farquhar — Gibber — Mrs. Cent- 
livre — Restoration tragedy — Dryden's Heroic plays — His blank-verse plays — 
His pla3'-songs and prologues — Crowne and Settle — Otway — Lee — Southerne 
and Rowe 

The twenty years' deprivation of dramatic entertainments which the 
English people had suffered naturally did not decrease their appetite 
for these. But the plays which were presented to them — perhaps 
the plays that they demanded — were of kinds strikingly „,, 
different from those which had been in vogue before at the 
1640. Not indeed that we must assume a total ^^s'°''^"°"- 
exclusion of the pre-Restoration drama from the theatre. Fletcher 
and Jonson long continued to hold the at least titular place of 
greatest English dramatists in critical — perhaps in vulgar — estimation. 
Shakespeare himself was acted, and not alwa3's in the travesties of 
Ravenscroft, Davenant, and (one has to add) Dryden. Others held 
the stage more or less, and there was room even for new plays of 
the old kind, such, for instance, as Chamberlayne's Love's Victory, 
under its stage title of Wits Led by the Nose, as late as 1678. But, 
as has to be so often repeated in literary history, facts of this kind 
are extremely delusive when taken by themselves. What we have 
to look to is the character of the plays of younger men, the theories 
advanced by younger critics, the mounting, in short, not the retreating, 
tide. It is because in literature ebb and flood always in this way 
overlap, instead of keeping apart with a clear interval between, that 
so many mistakes are made. The new currents did not make 
themselves distinctly perceptible immediately, and for a year or 
two the stage was supplied partly by old hands like Davenant (who, 
however, was himself a modern) and Shirley ; partly by intermediate 
persons like Wilson, Tatham, Lacy, who are undecided in style and 

4S3 



484 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book vm 

make no great mark in literature. ^ But they became noticeable, as 
regards comedy, to some extent in The Wild Gallant of Dryden, 
which dates from 1663, and still more in the Love in a Tub of 
Etherege, just after; as regards tragedy, in the "heroic" drama 
whicli the first named and others began to put on the stage before 
long, and which kept it for many years. 

The change in comedy was naturally less than in tragedy, for 
all kinds of comedy differ little and are closely akin. The humour- 
comedy of Jonson, indeed, was stoutly kept up by Shadvvell and 
others, and was too English a product ever to pass away entirely ; 
and Dryden himself did not innovate so very much on the more 
distinctly romantic comedy of Fletcher. The comedy of the Restora- 
tion par excellence is a kind copied to some extent from French 
and Spanish originals, and relying, first, on a more or less definite 
plot, intrigue, or whatever term may be preferred, — secondly, and 
still more, on witty dialogue. But the tragedy of the Restoration was 
a much more peculiar and anomalous phenomenon, and it is by no 
means equally easy to describe it in any terms at once accurate 
on the facts and likely to meet with general acceptance. It used to 
be complacently accepted, in common with many other literary 
symptoms of this special change, as a mere imitation of French 
models, fostered by the King's liking for everything French. That 
something in it was due to this is not denied ; but more careful, and 
at the same time wider-ranging, criticism has long refused to allow any 
paramount importance to this origin. Another French influence, 

that of the heroic romances, the most famous of which 
^"^pky"""^ are the work of Madeleine de Scudery, has also been 

exaggerated, but is also a true cause in part. These 
things, in the originals and tran.slated, had been very popular in 
England for some time, had left their mark on poetry, popular and 
unpopular, as has been noted above in reference to Gondibert and 
Pharonnida, and were in some cases actually dramatised in the heroic 
play. But this again will not do by itself, and cannot supply more 
than a small part of the required reasons. 

The greater part of the real cause may probably be found in 
certain changes already noticed, and to be noticed again, which were 
now passing by way of reaction over the national literary taste. As 
most of these changes were in a direction of increased sobriety, it 
may seem at first contradictory to connect with them a product like 
the heroic tragedy, which is one of the most extravagant in the whole 

1 All three to be found in Maidinent and Logan's Dramatists of the Restoration. 
Wilson, an Irish barrister, has no little power, but throws it into old forms. 
Other writers, older and younger — Howard, Killigrew, Tuke, Sir R. Fanshawe — 
would call for notice if space permitted. 

\ 



CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 4S5 

history of literature. But this is only an apparent difficulty, not a 
real one. 

This singular growth, which flourished specially for some fifteen 
or twenty years, but did not disappear wholly from the stage till long 
afterwards, so that it furnished jokes to Fielding's Tom Thiuub nearly 
three-quarters of a century after the Restoration, has for its main 
theme love affairs and affairs of war, in each of which the heroes (ably 
seconded by the heroines) set common sense and natural language 
at defiance ; and for form, a system of rhymed decasyllabic couplets, 
couched in the most emphatic style, and specially tending either to 
long harangues or to sharp interchange of single lines or distichs, 
something after the fashion of the stu/wuiyt/iia of the ancients. It 
is probable that the vehicle had more to do with it than the theme, 
though both were curiously well suited for each other. The couplet 
was the darling of the moment, and if this form of it is not good, no 
other is in English possible, for dramatic use. After the extraordinary 
shambling union of bad prose and worse blank verse which lias been 
noticed, the neat, sharply exploding couplets not unnaturally gratified 
the public ear ; and rant as rant had never been abhorrent to an 
English audience. Nay, as lending itself well to recitative, it was a 
kind of necessity to the half-operatic entertainment ^ which, as has been 
said, Davenant cleverly used as a shoe-horn to draw on his plays 
proper. In fine, the couplet was the mode, couplet-plays almost 
naturally invited ''heroic" subjects, and the thing took shape. 

It is curious and characteristic that Dryden, though at this time 
he had written very little, and had chiefly a vague Cambridge 
reputation of ability to go upon, was in the van of the new play 
movement with The Wild Gallant. And it is not less 
curious, and not less characteristic, that while the play comedies^. 
is not a good one as it stands, it was apparently worse 
when it first appeared, and was damned. In its later form, which 
succeeded by the protection of Lady Castlemaine, it is a sort of 
Comedy of Humours, with a dash of Fletcher, more of the nondescript 
drama, which, as we have seen, had been popular from Middleton 
downwards, and a very little of the new repartee and fashionable 
slang. Dryden did much better than this in some of his numerous 
comic ventures,'^ but it cannot be said that his comedy was ever at 

1 In 1656 Davenant obtained leave to produce, at Rutland House in Alders- 
gate Street, an "Entertainment after the Manner of the Ancients," consisting of a 
verse prologue, and some Discourses by Diogenes and Aristophanes, a Parisian, a 
Londoner, etc., with songs and music. It was immediately followed by 77ie Siege 
0/ Rhodes, a heroic play in operatic form. 

2 The best are, the comic part of the tragi-comic Maiden Queen, 1667 ; The 
Mock Astrologer, 1668; Marriage a la Mode, again tragi-comic, 1672; and 
Atnphitrycfi, 1691. 



486 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

the level either of his own j^owers or of the best performances of his 
contemporaries. His wit was not liglil enough ; his temper was too 
kindly ; and perhaps (for, though his birth was good and he married 
above it, he seems always to have been a home-keeping or tavern- 
haunting person, not desirous of gay society, nor shining in it) his 
habits too sedentary, for the airy, malicious genteel comedy which 
Etherege and Wycherley were to start, Congreve and Vanbrugh 
were to bring to perfection. One situation, that of the pair of lovers 
(it is characteristic again that with him, though with no one else of 
^his time, they might be married) who are very fond of each other 
ind not really very fond of any one else, but who do their very best 
to pretend indifference or faithlessness, he made something like his 
lown. At other times he either went near failure, or at any rate 
achieved no striking success, and too often he tried to make up for 
the absence of comedy by the presence of coarseness. 

For the typical Restoration comedy we must look elsewhere. 
" Gentle " George Etherege ^ by the merest accident lost his due 
when Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar were collected 
by Leigh Hunt as " Dramatists of the Restoration," and 
erege. .^^ ^^^^ usual Way, after an interval, the injustice has been 
more than made up to him. He was born somewhere between 
1634 and 1636, but as we do not know the date of his birth 
exactly, so we know nothing certainly about his extraction or his 
eilucation. We do not even know when he was knighted, but it 
must have been pretty late in the reign, and quite early in it we find 
him a courtier, a companion of Buckhurst, and in 1664 author of 
The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub. Four years later he wrote 
She would if She could. In 1676 he brouglit out his best play, TJie 
Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter, and got into a scrape with 
the watch at Epsom. In 1685 he was appointed English Resident 
at Ratisbon, an important post, because the Diet of the Empire was 
held there. From this time onwards we have letters of his, and the 
old story that he died by falling downstairs vino gravatus has no 
authority; it is pretty certain that wherever he died it was not at 
Ratisbon, and there is fair, though not certain, evidence that it was 
at Paris before February 1691. In that case he had probably 
followed the fortunes of James II. 

Etherege's three plays are very interesting ; they are decidedly 
clever, and they have certainly some arrears of credit due to them in 
consequence of the priority too often denied on the strength of the 
gasconades of Wycherley. But their positive merit is perhaps some- 
what less than might be gathered from the remarks of some of tlieir 

1 Ed. Verity, London, 1888. 



CHAP. 11 THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 4S7 

late panegyrists. Love in a Tub is at least as formless a thing as 
The Wild Gallant itself, and, like that, is a sort of hotch-potch of 
Jonson, Fletcher, and others, though, unlike that, it has couplet pas- 
sages. The serious part (for there is a serious part) is beneath con- 
tempt ; we have Widdleton's own fashion turned inside out, and worth- 
less tragic scenes tied to comic ones of some value. But even these last 
are very unequal, and the title-passages, those in which a French valet 
is imprisoned in a tub, are farce of the lowest. There is a good duel, 
and it is to Etherege's credit that the cloven foot of Restoration 
comedy — the passionless and malevolent licentiousness of too much 
thereof — does not appear. She would if She could is a great advance 
as a play, though the less said about its morals the better. It is 
thoroughly spirited. The heroine is amusiiig but not individual ; her 
girl companions are rather good, but not better than Dryden's ; the 
Prince Charming of the piece has still not descended to Restoration 
level. In the third. Sir Fopling Flutter, the wit and the composi- 
tion are again improved as the ethics and jesthetics are lowered. 
Dorimant, the hero, has been variously said to be a study from 
Rochester and from the author himself; it seems pretty certain that 
Sir Fopling is a known character, Sir Car Scrope, and that Medley is 
Sedley. However this may be (and it is of small importance), the 
piece is a typical example of tlie style by an author who had made 
his debut earlier than any other practitioner. It has plenty of wit, a 
considerable advance in stage merits on the earlier comedy, and a 
much more direct presentation of manners. 

In 1668 appeared two other comic dramatists, neither of whom 
quite hit the new way of comic writing, but both of whom, as well as 
a thiid, the notorious Mrs. Behn, preceded Wycherley's certain 
appearance. Thomas ShadwelH was born of a good Nor- 
folk family in 1640. We know little of his life, nor 
any reason except politics (he was a violent Whig^ for the sudden 
change of a friendship which had certainly existed between him and 
Dryden into the enmity which drew from him the virulent though 
ineffective libel entitled The Medal of foJin Bayes, and provoked 
the crushing retorts of MacFlecknoe and the '*' Og " passage in the 
second part of Absalom and Achitophel. He was rewarded at the 
Revolution with Dryden's forfeited laureateship, but died soon after- 
wards. Shadwell, who had a certain propensity to stimulants not 
merely alcoholic (he is said to have been an opium-eater), is said 
also to have been an agreeable companion, and of a wit much 

1 The only complete edition of Shadwell (4 vols. 1720) is very scarce and 
dear, most copies having perished in a fire. But just after his death some sets of 
the current copies of all his plays, including the posthumous I'olunieers, were 
bound up in 2 vols. 4to, and sometimes occur. I use this issue. 



488 ■ THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

lighter in conversation than in writing. His plays, however, though 
as mere literature deserving everything that Dryden has said of 
him, are yet by no means contemptible, and he himself provoked the 
oblivion which has fallen upon them. Of his seventeen pieces 
the first. The Sullen Lovers, both exemplified, and by its pref- 
ace explicitly heralded, the style of almost all — a style closely 
modelled on Jonson's, and devoted still to the setting forth of 
" humours," very loosely compacted into a play. Besides his in- 
ability to ''write," Shadwell has the drawbacks of a coarseness, 
excessive even for the time, and an almost invariable inability to 
achieve witty dialogue. But by way of setting to his humour he had 
the good luck to fix upon, and the good skill very fairly to achieve, a 
much distincter portraying of the manners, places, etc., of the time 
than men far more distinguished simply as men of letters have 
managed. Scott and Macaulay have been almost wholly indebted 
to his Squire of Alsatia (1689) for their pictures of that certainly 
picturesque if not edifying locality; Epsom Wells (1676) and Bury 
Fair (1686) give us sketches of seventeenth-century watering-places 
and holiday resorts, which do not come much behind those of the 
great novelists in merit, and long anticipate them in time. Shad- 
well's playhouse scenes, for all their clum.sy writing, have a nature 
altogether different from the brilliant artificiality which, if it became 
more brilliant, also became much more artificial in the progress from 
Etherege to Congreve. If Shadwell imagined little, he heard and 
saw much, and he enables us in turn to see and hear such things as 
the question and answer of his fops about town — 

(^.) What play are they playing? 
(^.) Some d d play or otlier. 

We know this to be true ; and these truths relieve the bad con- 
struction, the want of distinct character, and the clumsy and ill-written 
dialogue of such plays as 7V/e ]\Iiser (1672), The True Widow (1679), 
The Humourists (1671), Tlie Virtuoso (1676), The Scowrers (1691), 
though when Shadwell attempts original drama as in The Royal Shep- 

(herdess, botches Shakespeare, as in Ti//iou, tries the terrific, as in The 
Libertine (the earliest English version of the Don Juan story), or 
mixes politics and Irish humours in The LancasJiire Witches or Teague 
O'Divelly (1682), it may well seem to the reader that Dryden was 
rather too mild than too severe in the immortal castigations which 
he administered to his quondam friend and gratuitous libeller. As 
for Shadwell's strictly poetical qualifications, they simply do not 
exist. 

Sedley and Mrs. Behn 1 have been mentioned before as far as 
1 Editions as above. 



CHAP. ]i THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 489 

their lives and poems go ; their plays recall them here. Sedley, who 
is selected in Dryden's Essay of Dnmiatic Poesy (vide post) as repre- 
sentative of the extreme French party in dramatic taste, 
was also recognised by others as one of the best dramatic ^ ^' 
critics of the time ; but his actual plays are not great things. The 
Mulberry Garden, which had the same birth-year as The Sullen 
Lovers, presents the nondescript comedy, so often spoken of, charged 
with the new morals, or want of morals, of the time, and attempting 
repartee and RIolieresque dialogue. Bellainira (1687), which made 
its appearance very much later, but seems to have been of no very 
difTerent time in origin, is an adaptation of the Eunuchiis of Terence, 
in which the capabilities of the subject in certain directions are 
liberally developed, and in which there are some smart speeches. 
But it cannot be called a good play, and in jDarticular abuses the 
license of dramatic improbability to the greatest possible extent. 
The Grumbler is even more of an adaptation ; and Sedley's tragedies 
do not deserve notice in the latter part of this chapter, but show 
that he had not unlearnt the shambling blank verse of earlier times. 
Sedley, a man of fortune and fashion, merely wrote because it 
was part of the fashion to write ; IVIrs. Behn had to write for her 
living. Her plays are not as such by any means so remarkable as 
her poems (which mostly occur in them) or her novels, 

, ^ . ^ ■' . ^ ^ ,.1, • Mrs. Behn. 

but they are numerous and far from despicable, nor is 
there much justification for Pope's singling them out as specially 
immoral. At the same time Afra, if not much worse than others, is 
quite bad enough, while, like Sedley, she requires no notice in respect 
of her serious or tragical work, though this sometimes gives occasion 
to her finest lyric. The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers (1677- 
81), a double play in two long parts, is generally most praised, 
perhaps because it is really the best, perhaps because it comes first 
in the printed copies and many readers do not get farther. But 
The City Heiress is also a pleasant incident play of its own kind, 
and The Tozun Fop, The Lucky Chance, The IVidow Ranter, Sir 
Patient Fancy, and others reveal themselves pretty clearly by their 
titles. 

It must at least be said for William Wycherley ^ (whose reputed 
claims to priority, it is fair to remember, we have not from himself 
but on bad and late authority) that whether he wrote first or not, he 
certainly wrote best of the comic authors of Charles II. 's reign. He 
was the son and heir of a good old family in Shropshire, where he 

1 The edition of Leigh Hunt, containing also Congreve, Vanbrugh, and 
Farquhar, has long been the standard for this quartette. All, however, in whole 
or in part, appear in the " Mermaid Series," and have also been separately 
edited. 



490 THE AUGUSTAN AGES 



was born about 1640. He resided in France, where he had the advan- 
tage of the salon of Julie d'Angennes, Duchess of Montausier, who, 
however, cannot have exercised upon him the purifying 

Wvchcrlev i y o 

influence attributed in reference to her compatriot wits. 
After the Restoration lie returned to England and resided some time 
at Queen's College, Oxford, though he does not seem to have matricu- 
lated ; and he found himself probably more at home at the Middle 
Temple. He had. according to Pope, his friend later, already w-ritten 
Love in a ]]'ood; but no statement of Pope's is ever to be accepted 
without corroboration, and here we have none. The play did not 
actually appear till 1672, and attracted to Wycherley, who was very 
handsome, the spare attentions of Barbara Palmer, Duchess of 
Cleveland, which he shared with Marlborough and many others. 
For some years he was rather a prominent courtier, and he produced 
The Gentlenian Dancing Master (1673), ^^^^ Country Wife (1675), 
and Tlie Plain Dealer (1677), in pretty rapid succession. It seems 
to have been after this that he married the Countess Dowager of 
Drogheda, a lady nobly born as well as connected, handsome and 
well dowered. But she is said to have been vciy jealous, and though 
she left Wycherley at her death, not very long afterwards, all the money 
she could, the legacy brought him only lawsuits and a long imprison- 
ment for debt. As a very old man he made the acquaintance of 
Pope, succeeded at the death of his father, who must have been a 
nonagenarian, to the family estate, married again and settled a 
jointure on his wife, and died immediately afterwards in 1715. 

He seems to have earned the liking as well as the admiration of 
his contemporaries, and while they recognised 

The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherley, 

they do not seem to have attributed to him any of the ill-nature which 

we see in his own Manly. His ability is shown within a rather small 

compass. Love in a Vl'ood is not superior, or very little superior, to 

most of the comedies mentioned in the last few paragraphs, and 

though it is unjust to call The Gentleman Dancing Master, as 

Hazlitt has called it, a " long, foolish farce," it has no great merit. 

But The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer (the latter an extremely 

free following of Moliere's Misanthrope) are simply the strongest and 

wittiest plays of the comic kind produced in England between Fletcher 

and Congreve, that is to say, for more than sixty years. They are 

! deeply tarred with the Restoration brush of coarseness, so much so 

!that even the next century, little troubled as it was with squeamish- 

ness, had to adjust the plot of The Country Wife to more decent 

and savoury conditions. Nor have they any prominent merit of con- 



CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 49! 

stmction ; it has been said that no plays of this period have. But 
Wycherley lias made great progress in the type-character of his 
French originals over all his contemporaries ; he has some very 
original figures, such as the Widow Blackacre of The Plain Dealer. 
And, above all, he has discovered and put -in practice, to no small 
measure and extent, the particular forte of his own kind in his own 
time. Etherege, Sedley, even Dryden, though it was out of his 
way, had all been trying to hit off" the smart repartee and sparkling 
dialogue which Moliere had given in French. But Wycherley was 
the first who did this really well and pretty constantly. It is true 
that the fault of the style makes its appearance with the merits. It 
cannot be said that the action of Tlie Coimtry Wife, to take the earliest 
instance, at all requires, or is to any aj^preciable degree helped by, 
the hit-or-miss witticisms which Horner and his friends allow them- 
selves for pages in the very first scene of the very first act. But in 
hardly any Restoration play have we any better action, and here we, 
at any rate, have the tongue-fence to amuse ourselves with instead. 

Some of the writers chiefly noticeable as tragedians wrote comedies, 
but hardly anything of theirs deserves actual notice except the Sir 
Courtly Nice of Crowne {vide infra) . But there is one other famous 
comic work of the reign of Charles II. which must be , „ , 

, , . , , , . ,„, „ , 71 ^ ^ -1 1 The Rehearsal. 

dealt with, and that is ihe Reliearsal^ (1671), attributed 
to the Duke of Buckingham, but pretty certainly the work in the main 
of coadjutors, who included even the Roman hand of Butler himself. 
From the first the piece, which was for years on the stocks, was 
meant to attack a Laureate, whence the name Bayes, but Dryden 
was not Laureate at the time that it was begun, and it was aimed at 
Davenant. Nor, though there are undoubted strokes at Dryden 
personally, is he responsible for all the things ridiculed in it. The 
play is. in fact, a cento of extracts or parodies from heroic tragedies 
strung together and attached to a roughly sketched scenario of the 
same heroic kind. The idea is, of course, not entirely new, but had 
never been carried out in quite the same way, and naturally caused 
a great deal of amusement. It has been twice imitated in very 
popular pieces, the Tom TJittmb of Fielding and the Critic of Sheridan, 
and though the latter is certainly even better than Tlie Re/iearsal, 
The Rehearsal itself is admirably good. 

The glory, however — a glory by no means unmixed with shame — 
of this Restoration drama was not reached till long after the Restora- 
tion itself, and by a set of men whose knowledge of the brilliant brutal 
ways of that time was mostly traditional and literary. There is much 
less reality about Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar than about 

1 Ed. Arber, 



492 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

Shadwell and Sedley ; and it is this which gave such validity as it 
has to the whimsical attempt of Charles Lamb to excuse their want 
The ereat ^^ decency and of morals in every sense. But in fact no 
artificial excuses are possible, and the least valid of all is that 
come y. ^yi^j^.]^ attempts to shield them under the mantle of the 
classics. The actual license of Aristophanes, in some directions of act 
and word, is very much beyond that of Congreve and Vanbrugh. But 
Aristophanes does not, like Vanbrugh and Congreve, make faithless- 
ness a distinction and brutality an order of merit. On this point 
there can be no •' transaction "' ; but having pronounced on it, we may 
proceed to do justice to the literary merit of these authors, which in 
some ways is of almost the highest degree. Their forte is still not 
composition, which in all the three (in Vanbrugli perhaps least) is 
weak, but, as before, in the amusing nature of the scattered scenes 
and characters and, far more than before or ever again, in the un- 
ceasing salvo of verbal wit which rings through their best pieces. 

William Congreve, the greatest of the three in their special 
greatness, was a cadet of a good Staffordshire family seated at a 
place whence it took its name, but was born (February 1670) in 
Yorkshire, at a house near Leeds which belonged to his 
" ' mother's uncle. His father, a soldier, became a land- 
agent in Ireland, and Congreve was educated at its then best grammar 
school, Kilkenny, and at Trinity College, Dublin, whence he passed 
to the Middle Temple in London. He began in literature with a 
prose tale. Incognita (1692), which there have been few to read and 
not a soul to praise, but soon submitted his first play. The Old 
Bachelo}\ to Dryden, who praised it highly, put it perhaps a little 
into stage shape, and got it acted in January 1693. Within the 
same year, for Congreve certainly had the precocity which Wycherley 
perhaps affected, came The Double Dealer. Love for Love came in 
April 1695, TJie Moi/rnhig Bride two years later, and The Way of 
the U'orld m 1700. This last, for what reason it is difficult to con- 
ceive, was not successful, and Congreve, who had already been 
annoyed by the protest of Jeremy Collier (7Jide infra) against his 
style, left the stage never to return. He received valuable Govern- 
ment places, wrote a masque or two and some very excellent lyrics 
in the artificial style, and died in 1729, leaving most of his money 
to Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough. 

Congreve's tragedy will have its place later; his four comedies 
advance with a singularly even and rapid progression. The Old 
Bachelor is not much, if at all, better than Wycherley, and its hero 
(not the title hero), Vainlove, is, with a young man's exaggeration, 
made to outdo all the other heroes from Dorimant downward, whom 
he copies, in loveless and joyless debauchery. The Double Dealer is 



CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 493 

a very great improvement, though it is ahiiost more of a tragi-comedy 
than a comedy, and might, indeed, with very shght alteration of 
incident and hardly any of language, have come to the sanguinary 
end which it very nearly reaches in fact. The characters of Lady 
Touchwood and of Maskwell, her nephew and gallant, have a touch 
not merely of villainy but of sombre sullenness about them, which 
cannot but be felt as rather out of place ; indeed, it is in this play 
and in The Way of tJie World, much more than in The Aloiiniiiig 
Bride, that Congreve shows the tragic power he certainly possessed. 
This shadow entirely disappears from Love for Love, which is all 
pure comedy, albeit behind some of the merriment there is little real 
mirth. Probability and strict stage construction are still as much 
to seek here as elsewhere, and no one of the characters is a whole 
live personage like those of Shakespeare in the drama before, and 
those of Fielding in the novel later. But, on the other hand, there 
is hardly one who, as a personage of artificial comedy, is not a triumph, 
from Sir Sampson Legend, the testy father, though his sons Valentine 
(spendthrift and rake, but a better fellow than most of them) and 
Ben, the simple sailor, who was now becoming a stock stage figure ; 
through the sisters Foresight and Frail, whose simultaneous discovery 
of each other's slips is one of the capital moments of English comic 
literature ; and the foolish astronomer. Foresight ; and Tattle, the 
frivolous beau ; and Jeremy, the impossibly witty servant ; and Angelica, 
giving us the contemporary notion of a heroine who is neither heartless 
nor a fool ; and Prue, the hoyden. All these are, for purely theatrical 
flesh and blood, perfect triumphs in their kind, and they move 
throughout in a perfect star-shower of verbal fireworks. 

Yet Congreve had not exhausted himself. The Way of the 
World, though in some points it returns to the mixed and semi- 
tragic, or at least serious, cast of The Double Dealer, is a better-knit 
play than Love for Love, and contains in Millamant, the coquettish 
heroine, the queen of all her kind. Congreve has indeed borrowed 
the lay figure for her — and something more — from an excellent play 
which nobody reads, Dryden's Marriage a la Mode, but he has given 
her a tenfold portion of air and fire, and indeed left nothing to be 
done in the same direction. Lady Wishfort, too, is another masterly 
personage, and the more sinister figures of Fainall and Mrs. Marwood 
are full of power, which indeed, in one way or another, few of the 
characters lack. What none of them lack is wit, the mere writing 
of the play being better than that of Love for L^ove itself. 

Sir John Vanbrugh, at least the rival of Congreve at his best, but 
far more unequal, was born no one seems quite to know where or 
when. He himself, perhaps in joke, said that the place was the 
Bastille, and he was certainly much abroad, though his family seems 



494 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

to have been long transferred from the Netherlands to England. 
The date is supposed to have been about 1666. He was a soldier, 
a herald (he became Clarencieux King-at-Arms), and 
latterly a very well-known architect, Blenheim and Castle 
Howard being only the greatest of his performances in tliis line, from 
whicli some structural advantages have been good-naturedly argued 
to his plays. We hear positively of him first in 1695, when he was 
appointed by Evelyn secretary to the Greenwich Hospital Commission; 
and two years later, in 1697, his first play, The Relapse, appeared. 
Next year came Tlie Provoked ll'ife, and the last on which his 
reputation rests. The Confederacy, in 1705. Vanbrugh wrote several 
others, but they were mostly translations or adaptations from Moliere 
and Boursault, and of little value, thougli his unfinished Journey to 
London has stronger points. He was knighted in 1714, at the 
coming of the Hanoverians, and died in 1726. 

It is a little odd that T/ie Relapse is an avowed continuation of a 
play by another dramatist, Colley Cibber (see below), produced the 
year before, and entitled Love's Last Shift. Vanbrugh kept the 
characters, but treated them in a style to which Cibber (who himself 
acted in the sequel) had no pretensions. Lord Foppington (the Sir 
Novelty Fashion of the earlier play) is the last and by far the best of 
the line begun by Sir Fopling Flutter ; indeed, he forms a better pair 
to Congreve's Millamant than anything of Congreve's own ; and his 
final resignation to his brother of the bride of whom that cadet has 
cheated him, '• Dear Tarn, since things are thus fallen aut, prithee, 
give me leave to wish you jay ! I do it de bon coeiir, strike me 
dumb! You have married a woman beautiful in her person, 
charming in her airs, prudent in her canduct, canstant in her inclina- 
tions, and of a nice marality, split my windpipe!" reaches the sub- 
lime of the comic. The Provoked Wife and The Confederacy, 
though a little less witty, are perhaps better as plays, and certainly 
more original. Sir John Brute, the hero of the first-named, has been 
very highly praised, and deserves the praise, with the limitations 
already made, that he is rather a type than an individual, and that 
his life is stage life. The Confederacy is the most uniform, the best 
moving, and perhaps the best charactered, of all Vanbmgh's plays, 
and it is particularly noticeable for the author's having dared to make 
It a middle-class play throughout. The lords and baronets so 
common in the Restoration drama vanish, to be replaced by a pair 
of money-scriveners (like the fathers of Milton and Gray), their wives 
and families, a dealer in old clothes and money-lending, and her son, 
etc. But with the loss in gentility there is a gain in liveliness, and 
Corinna, the lieroine, if still a little stagey, has stage life to the full. 

George Farquhar, the last and youngest of the trio, was the son 



CHAi'. II THE AGE OF DRYD EN — DRAMA 495 

of a clergyman, and was born at Londonderry in 1678. As his first 
comedy, Ij}ve and a Bottle^ was produced the year after Vanbrugh's 
Relapse, he was on a level with, and almost in advance of, 
the rest of his group in early writing. He had previously ^^^^ 
been an undergraduate of Trinity College, Dublin, an actor (he is 
said to have left the stage because he nearly killed a brother actor by 
accident in a stage duel), and an officer in the army ; nor did he give 
up this latter profession till just before his death, which happened in 
his thirtieth year. He had married, and, it is said, had experienced 
one of the tricks so common on the stage of his time, being deceived 
by his wife as to her fortune. But he is also said to have in no 
way punished her for her deceit : indeed, the general tradition of him 
is of a good-natured and amiable, though slightly feather-brained, 
person. This tradition was possibly founded on, and is certainly not 
oat of harmony with, the seven plays which (with some miscellanies in 
prose and verse) he left behind him. For these plays are much more 
good-natured than those of Congreve and Vanbrugli, though there is 
looseness enough in their morality. They also exhibit a steady 
improvement, which, considering the author's youth at his death, 
makes it probable that he would have done things even better than 
the Beaux-Stratagem had he lived. Love and a Bottle, the first, is 
no great thing, being almost undistinguishable, except that it has a 
little more of the new wit, from many plays of many writers. The 
Constant Couple, or a Trip to the Jubilee, and Sir Harry IVildair, 
two plays connected after a fashion in which the time took pleasure 
as first and second part, and presenting some resemblances in scheme 
to Gibber and Vanbrugh's pair, have more merit. But they probably 
owed most of their popularity with their own and succeeding genera- 
tions to the impudent ease with which the favourite actress. Peg 
Woffington, in man's clothes, played Sir Harry. The Inconstant and 
The Way to ivin Him are far from achieving the excellence of the 
last pair. The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux-Stratagem. There 
is a vividness and gusto about the scenes of the first, and the parts of 
Captain Plume and his sergeant Kite, which at least does not dis- 
courage the supposition that Farquhar drew on his personal experiences 
in recruiting and country quarters ; though, if '" Silvia " be the 
damsel who deceived him, his magnanimity was certainly not small. 
The Beaux-Stratagem, which, though not much to boast of from the 
moral point of view, is one of the least morally objectionable plays of 
the whole set, also deserves the repute it has retained above almost 
all of them by the liveliness of the incidents and dialogues, the happy 
humour-characters of the servant Scrub and Boniface the rascally 
landlord, the ingenious impudence of Archer, and the well-written 
parts of Squire and Mrs. Sullen. 



496 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

The protest of Jeremy Collier (see next chapter) either produced, 
or more probably coincided with, a certain change of public taste in 
comedy, and though the plays from 1700 onwards are by no means 
remarkable, as a rule, for squeamishness, they are not merely freer 
from " immorality and profaneness," but distinctly humaner in tone, 
than those of the forty years between 1660 and 1700. They are also 
much worse as literature. Those of Steele and Addison had best be 
noticed with other works of their respective writers, but two drama- 
tists who belong to both periods — to the earlier in general style, to 
the later in a certain modification of the ranker features of the 
Restoration play — may be despatched here. One of them, indeed, 
Colley Gibber,^ has been mentioned already, and will be 
mentioned yet again in connection with Pope. He was 
born in 167 1, the son of a sculptor of much note and some merit, 
and became an actor and playwright early, as well as later Poet- 
Laureate, being also long manager of Drury Lane. The usual edition 
of Gibber's works contains sixteen plays, but he is said to have 
written nearly double that number. Love's Last Shift itself, The 
Careless Husband, and The Nonjuror (an adaptation of Tartuffe) 
are the best known of them. Most are fairly lively, but hardly any 
is really literature. 

Very similar, though a little better at their best, are the nineteen 

pieces of Susannah Gentlivre,- who is believed to have been born 

about 1680. She was the daughter of a Lincolnshire gentleman 

named Freeman, but seems to have passed her girlhood 

Mrs. Centlivre. . . ^ , i oi 

in poor circumstances, and as an orphan. She was 
thrice married, her third husband being, as her admiring female 
biographer calls him, " a French gentleman." Of him history 
records that he, being a connoisseur in cookery, obliged King William 
and Queen Anne by condescending to superintend their kitchen as 
yeoman, whence he is indeed called by some a cook. She died in 
1722. The best of her plays are The Busybody and A Bold Stroke 
for a Wife, from the last of which comes at least one universally 
known and quoted phrase, " the real Simon Pure." They are nearer 
literature than Gibber's, but they are chiefly interesting because they 
show the change of taste. The theme is still intrigue, but it is 
almost always unsuccessful. 

The tragic authors of the period and their tragedies occupy a 
position on the whole less important, though distinctly curious. With 
all their faults, there can be no doubt that comedies like Love for 
T^ove, The Confederacy, and The Beaux-Stratagem mark in certain 
directions an advance upon all English comic work before them, 

1 Dramatic Wivks, 4 vols. London, 1760. 

2 Works, 3 vols. London, 1761 ; reprinted, 1872. 



CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 497 

except that of Shakespeare, with which they do not compare. On the 
other hand, All for Love and Venice Preserved, not to mention others, 
do come into pretty direct competition with Hamlet and 
Macbeth, and are, with all their merits, inferior not ^"agedy?" 
merely to these, but to many others. The diiference is 
not in the least surprising. For poetry is not necessary to comedy, 
and is absolutely necessary to tragedy. And it is precisely in poetry 
that the second half of the seventeenth century is inferior to the 
first. 

The tragedy of the time divides itself, with the usual overlapping, 
into two parts — the Heroic drama, already discussed, which was 
triumphant between 1660 and 1680, and did not entirely disappear 
between 1680 and 1700; and the blank-verse tragedy, Dryden's 
altered in spirit rather than in intention from that Heroic 
" before the flood," which was not quite absent in the p ' ^ • 
first time, and which prevailed once more in the second. In both 
periods and in both kinds the mighty craftsmanship of Dryden led 
the way, and despite the traditional repute of Venice Preserved, it is 
impossible here to admit that any examples surpassed Tlie Conquest 
of Granada in the first kind, and All for Love in the second. 

The Rival Ladies, which is Dryden's first serious play, and which 
followed The Wild Gallant at no great interval, is neitlier wholly 
tragic nor wholly comic, neither wholly rhymed nor wholly blank 
verse and prose. But the Indian Emperor (1665), following an 
Indian Queen, in which he had helped his brother-in-law, Sir Robert 
Howard, was his first distinct and original venture wholly in the new 
style. The Maiden Queen (1667) is a blend of tragic, or at least 
serious, heroics and comic prose. But Tyrannic Love, or The Royal 
Martyr (1669), a dramatisation of the legend of St. Catherine, first 
exhibited the heroic style in perfection. The rants of the Emperor 
Maximin and the preposterous character of some of the incidents 
were bywords even in their own day, but the splendid rhetoric of 
the best passages, the rattling single-stick play of the rhyming 
dialogue, and the really noble sentiment of much of it, almost excuse 
the enthusiasm of audiences for a style full of the most glaring faults. 
This is still more the case with the two parts of The Conquest of 
Granada (1670), which brought the kind to its highest perfection, 
purged it of some of the absurdities which were not, as most were, 
inherent, and certainly contains many of the best pieces of declama- 
tion, and not a few of not the worst pieces of poetry, in the English 
language. 

The Rehearsal came out very shortly, but it did not in the least 
" kill " heroics, which continued to flourish. For a time, indeed, 
Dryden chiefly wrote comedies or tragi-comedies ; but the most 



498 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

curious of all his experiments, the "tagging" of Paradise Lost 
into a drama, The State of Innocence, which is half an opera and 
more than, half a Heroic play, shows the undiminished popularity of 
the style. And in 1675 appeared the extremely fine Aurengzebe, 
still heroic. This, however, contains both indirect evidence and a 
direct confession that the author was tiring of rhyme, the latter in a 
statement of the prologue, and the former throughout, in the constant 
preference of overlapped or enjambed lines to the strict couplet. 
Nothing can better show Dryden's literary peculiarities both in strength 
and weakness than the fact that, when he turned from rhyme to blank 
verse, he actually took a play of Shakespeare's for something more 
than the canvas of his new attempt. It is true that in the identity 

of subject of All for Love and Antony and Cleopatra we 
v^rse^pfay't. "^"^^ "^^ ^cc too much. Not merely was it the habit of 

the time to refurbish old work, not merely had Dryden 
himself a peculiar theory about what he called "translation," but 
from the very infancy of the Elizabethan drama itself it had been 
the almost invariable habit to refashion older plays. The really 
extraordinary thing in All for Love is not that it follows Antony 
and Cleopatra, but that, in following, it keeps so far from plagiarism ; 
not that its kind is inferior to Shakespeare's, but that it achieves such 
excellence as it does in that kind. The fact is that it is a great, 
and a very great, play, with more of the earth and less of the air in 
it than in its model. It stands on an entirely different footing from 
the travesty of Troiliis and OvjJ/V/rtr, which followed it in 1679; but 
the scenes which Dryden contributed to Lee's CEdipus and Dtike of 
Guise contain some of his very best work. When his apparent ruin 
at the Revolution drove him back to the stage, the first play he wrote, 
in 1690, was the very fine tragedy of Don Sebastian (which the older 
criticism put at the head of his work in this kind, though nowadays 
All for Love is mostly preferred) ; and while his last play of all, Love 
Triumphant, was a tragi-comedy, the last but one, Cleomenes, was a 
pure tragedy and a fine one. 

Dryden's all but invariable primacy was also well displayed in 
two adjuncts to the drama of the time, one of which it possessed in 
common with that of the last age, while the other was more, though 
still not quite, peculiar to it. The first of these consisted of the songs 
with which it was still customary to intersperse, and here, if he no- 
where quite equals the surpassing gems of Sedley and Mrs. Behn, 
he has a much larger number of very high average quality. The 
other lay in the Prologue and Epilogue, which, occasional if not 
rare before 1640, became after 1660 one of the most regular and 
popular appurtenances of plays. The fashion was no doubt much 
helped by the introduction of women on the stage, for the prologues 



CHA?. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN— DRAMA 499 

and epilogues were usually, though not invariably, spoken by the 
prettiest and most favourite actresses. By degrees it became cus- 
tomary for novices, or those who were not confident in jjjj pj^y. 
their own powers of verse (these pieces were all but songs and 

• 1 1 • 1 . 7 r 1 IX prologues. 

nivanably m the smartest style 01 the new couplet) to 
get friends, for love or for money, to help them out, and Dryden\s 
own scanty income was eked in no small degree by sums thus re- 
ceived, while his prologues and epilogues to his own and others' 
plays make a very considerable section of his work. Their matter 
is more unequal than their form, for, being addressed specially ad 
vitlgiis, they offered too great temptation to aim at popularity first of 
all ; and the political savagery of some of these pieces, the license of 
the language and imagery in others, must have counted for not a 
little in his sense of the necessity, if not the adequacy, of the anti- 
thetic excuse formulated by Johnson later — 

For we that live to please must please to live. 

Dryden's earliest and longest-lived rival, or rather contemporary, 
in tragedy was John Crowne — "starch Johnny Crowne," as Rochester 
called him from some real or imputed primness. Crowne ^ was a 
Nova Scotian, and is thought to have been born as early 
as 1640, and to have died as late as 1705. He supplied '^s^t'tle'^" 
the stage for nearly thirty years with some eighteen 
. plays, the best of which is the adapted comedy of Sir Cojirily Nice, 
already mentioned, and said to have been, like other good plays and 
poems, due to the suggestion of Charles himself. Crowne was once 
utilised by Rochester's spite to vex Dryden, his masque of Calisto being 
preferred to something of the Laureate's for a court entertainment. 
He wrote a rhymed tragedy, Caligula, as late as 1698, and had 
an inclination rather to the tragic than to the comic muse. But he 
is the least notable of all the tragic writers of the time except one, 
putting merely insignificant figures out of question. This one is 
Elkanah Settle, the "Doeg" of the second part of Absalom and 
AcJtitophel. In the early furore for heroic plays. Settle, who was 
born in 1648, produced in 1673 one entitled The Empress of Morocco, 
which was thought by the younger sort quite to put Dryden in the 
shade, and was printed with elaborate engravings. It is curious that 
Dryden, losing for once his usual Olympian indifference, joined 
Crowne and Shadwell (the very man whom he was afterwards to 
couple with Settle) in attacking The Empress. Settle wrote much 
else, became city poet and a puppet-show keeper, and died at an 

1 Among Maidment and Logan's Dramatists of the Restoration, 4 vols. Edin- 
burgh, 1873. 



500 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

advanced age in 1724, half pitied, half jeered at, by the wits of the 
next generation. 

Somewhat younger, and very much better, were three other 
dramatists who with Dryden exhibit the tragic abilities of Charles II. 's 
time at the best — Otway, Lee, and Southerne. Their merits as play- 
wrights follow the order of their birth, though Lee is far 
'^^^' the best poet of the three. Thomas Otway ^ was born 
in 1 65 1. He was the son of a Sussex clergyman, and cannot have 
been ill oiT, since he entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a gentleman 
commoner. But the stage had more attraction for him than the 
Church, though he was quite a failure as an actor,, and for the 
moment turned to the army, where he obtained a cornetcy, as some 
say, though others supposed him only to have enlisted. He certainly 
served more than one campaign. But the theatre continued to 
exercise its fascination, which was made stronger in his case by the 
charms of Mrs. Barry, a beautiful actress, who appeared in his first 
play, Alcibiades. He seems to have had Rochester for a rival, and 
certainly had him for a libeller. In 1676 he followed Alcibiades 
with Don Carlos, a rhyming play of some merit in its kind, and then 
turned to adaptations from the French and rubbishy comedies. But in 
1680 he produced one of his two great plays, T/ie OrpJtan, with a 
Cains Marias which is less good, and in 1682 his masterpiece, 
Venice Preserved. Three years later, having in the interval written 
a bad comedy. The Atheist, he died miserably, it is said by choking 
himself after semi-starvation. 

His misfortunes, however, like Chatterton's, have perhaps helped 
his fame. Both in his own time, during the eighteenth century, and 
even beyond it, Monimia and Belvidera, the heroines of The Orphan 
and of Venice Preserved, were among the most favourite parts both 
with tragic actresses and their audiences, while Venice Preserved at 
least has kept to the present day a traditional reputation as the best 
tragedy out of Shakespeare, the only tragedy of great merit subse- 
quent to the Restoration, and so forth. It is perhaps fortunate for 
Otway that the validity of these praises is not often tested by reading. 
There is certainly pathos in both plays, and a good deal of diffused 
tragic passion of various kinds. Nor should the utter worthlessness 
of the comic or semi-comic parts of Venice Preserved be charged 
heavily against Otway. But that prosaic element which is such a 
favourite objection to the time seems, to some at least, to appear here 
more than it does in Dryden, more than it does in Lee. Otway''s 
verse has resonance but no melody, his sentiment pathos, but neither 
refinement nor strangeness, nor always strict tragic quality. Above 

1 Works, 3 vols. London, 1757. 



CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 501 

all, neither in sound nor in sense has he any suggcstiveness. The 
declamation of Dryden and the rant of Lee pass in many passages 
into poetry ; it is difficult to put the finger on a single one of Otway's 
of which, putting the mere appeal to sentiment aside, as much can be 
said. With the elocution of the "star," the beauty of the actress, the 
accompaniment of the theatre, he may thrill ; in the study, and read, 
he does not. 

On that side, indeed, of the drama which is not literature but stage- 
craft, Otway has very strong appeals. It has been noticed by the 
late Mr. Roden Noel ^ that even his comedies are much better con- 
structed, and present a much more coherent fable to the audience, 
than most of the plays of the time. And this is still more the case 
with his two great tragedies. Unpresentable as is The Orphan to a 
modern audience, its pathos is perfectly true and just in itself, and 
much more tragic than that of Venice Preserved. Castalio, one of 
the two brothers who are in love with Monimia, has brought upon 
himself the punishment which he receives in the deceit practised on 
her by the other brother Polydore, first by his own braggart and 
libertine sneers at marriage, which make Polydore take dishonour- 
able designs for granted, and secondly by stealing a march upon 
Polydore himself. So too in Venice Preserved, though the unamiable 
and exaggerated rant of the time appears in the character of Pierre 
throughout, though Belvidera is stagey to the last degree, and Jaffier 
seems quite unreasonably to vent wrath for the ruin which is due to 
his own folly on the world at large, yet Otway has throughout a fast 
hold on his audience. 

It is on the literary side that he fails. His verse is not merely 
harsh and unmusical : he is deeply affected by the slovenly collo- 
quialisms and degradations of style which, as we shall see in the 
next chapter, were at this time jeopardising English style altogether, 
and which Dryden was almost alone in resisting. This drawback is 
of itself almost fatal. In the dying speech of Monimia, the climax of 
one of the most heartrending scenes and situations to be found, out- 
side the greatest examples of Elizabethan tragedy, there occurs this 
distich — 

Speak well of me, and if thou hear ill tongues 
Speak evil of my fame, don^t hear mc ivrongeii. 

To any one with an ear this •' don't " (which cannot be helped away 
by resolving it into "do not " with a slur) means simply gnashing of 
teeth. 

But even this is not so fatal as the astounding absence in Otway 
of poetical expression to suit his poetical sentiment. In all the 

1 In his " Mermaid" edition of Ojtway, London, 1888. 



502 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

famous passages of Venice Preserved, that between Jaffier and Pierre, 
the scaffold scene, and the rest, I cannot remember one phrase, one 
"jewel five words long," that gives the sudden blaze proper to poetry. 
In The Orphan there is nothing better than Polydore's speech as 
he drops his sword and runs on his brother's — • 

Now my Castalio is again my friend; 

and though this is adequate and passable, we cannot help thinking 
how not merely Shakespeare, but half a dozen others, Middleton, 
Webster, Fletcher, Tourneur, Ford, even Shirley, Avould have phrased 
it, nay, how Dryden, and not only Dryden, among Otway's own con- 
temporaries, would have been equal to the occasion. 

The stars of Lee ^ were not much more auspicious than Otway's 
own, though they spared him the touch of squalor which lies on the 
luckless bard of Belvidera. Nathaniel, generally known as Nat, Lee 
was born in 1655, the son of a clergyman in Hertford- 
shire, and, like his great collaborator Dryden, was 
educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. 
He too became an actor early, and turned from acting to play-writing. 
But his mind was soon clouded by insanity ; he was for years at 
intervals an inmate of the madhouse, and when he died, it is 
said from injuries received in a drunken squabble, at the age of 
thirty-seven, in 1692, he was probably as much mad as drunk. '■^ 
He was only twenty when his first play, Nero, came out. It is heroic, 
but bastard-heroic, the rhymes being not continuous, but interspersed 
with passages of blank verse and prose. SopJionisba, the next, on 
a subject which seems to have had a sort of hereditary attraction for 
all the more boisterous sort of tragedians, is entirely in rhyme, as is 
Gloriana, or the Court of Augustus Cczsar, produced in the same 
year. Next year, 1677, gave the Rival Queens, and the next again 
Mithridaies. Both these plays, which were the most popular of the 
author (the "Rival Queens," Statira and Roxana, continuing for 
many years to be favourite characters on the stage), were in blank 
verse, with no prose, and with rhyme only used now and then in the 
old way at the end of scenes, or to top speeches where a clap was 
expected. Some of Lee's very best work is to be found in (Edipus, 
where he worked with Dryden on a very fair level. The other 
combination of the two in the Di/ke of Guise was not quite so 
successful, though the play contains fine things. In the rest of 
Lee's work, which is wholly confined to tragedy, and which comprises 

1 Works, 3 vols. London, 1734. 

2 Another story is that he escaped from his keepers on a snowy night, and 
died of exposure. 



CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRVDEN — DRAMA 503 

'Hicodosius, the Princess of Cleve, the Massacre of Paris, Ctesar 
Borgia, and Constantine tlie Great, his defects are perhaps more 
obvious than his merits. But as his best work is not free from the 
former, so the latter are perceivable even in his worst. 

On the whole, Lee has been more harshly judged than any other 
English dramatist. His foible for rant early became a byword, and 
was no doubt exaggerated by the knowledge of his madness. The 
form in which he wrote at least part of his works — the heroic rhymed 
tragedy — is the very worst in the world for bringing out the contrast 
of bombast and bathos, which Dryden himself by no means very 
often escapes, and to which all others succumb. Lee's excitable 
brains were not, and could not be expected to be, critical ; indeed, he 
iiings out fine things and foolish things with equal indifference, or 
rather with equal enthusiasm. Lastly, it must be confessed that he 
comes far below Otway, or rather hardly enters into competition 
with him, either as a constructor of plots or a creator of situa- 
tions. There certainly is pathos in Lee, but it is chiefly given him 
by his stories, or by a gift to be noticed presently, not by his power 
of appealing directly to the sympathy of the audience. His plots and 
his characters are all framed with a view to rapid superficial effect of 
sound and fury, and they rush across the stage in successive blasts 
which leave the spectator, or indeed the reader, not quite uninterested, 
not by any means cold, and not even wholly contemptuous even of 
the flatnesses and frigidities. But they make no appeal to sympathy ; 
and, but for the one reserved point again, they are too unreal to 
inspire terror. 

That one reserved point, however, is that Lee is a poet. It is 
not merely that his versification, though unequal, is far better than 
Otway's. It is that he has the faculty (as the greatest critics have 
been driven to express it) of saying things "in a poetical way." His 
finest passage of all — one in Mithridates on Death — is not, any more 
than the finest passages of others, absolutely original in thought. 
He may have got it from Raleigh, he may have got it from Marston, 
with whom he has at least the connection that they both write 
Sophonisbas. But he has put it for himself and made it, or re- 
made it, poetry. Again take — 

To the driven air my flying soul is fastened. 

Nobody but a poet could have put " driven " and " flying " where they 
are. Otway never would have thought of it. And again — 

Oh pity that so fair a star should be 
The child of night. 

He not only has the word, " the lovely chance-word," as he says 



504 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

somewhere himself, but he can arrange it in verbal and rhythmical 
arrangement, perfect in sense and sound. 

Thomas Southerne — the chief tragic dramatist of the reign of Anne 

— though a lesser man than either Otway or Lee, still claims place by 

right, and Nicholas Rowe perhaps by tradition. After Rowe, no one 

who owes his place in literature to drama will come in 

ancTRowe! ^'^'^^ ^^^Y ^iH Sheridan, though a few men of distinction in 
other ways also wrote for the theatre, and a few play- 
wrights pure and simple may find corners somewhere. 

Southerne^ was an Irishman by birth, though not by extraction, 
and was born in Dublin county in the year 1659. Trinity College 
received him and sent him to the Middle Temple, whence, like other 
playwrights of the time, he proceeded not merely to play-writing, but 
to service for a time in the army. Although possessed of an eye to 
the main chance — Pope's well-known couplet, 

Tom, whom Heaven sent down to raise 
The price of prologues and of plays, 

glances on the one hand at Dryden's having doubled his tariff for 
prologue-furnishing in the case of Southerners Loyal BroHier, on the 
other at the profits which the young dramatist himself made — as well 
as of literary talent, he was liked and respected by three generations 
of men of letters, from Dryden, who was on as good terms with him 
as with Congreve, through the Addison and Pope set, till nearly the 
middle of the eighteenth century, when he died at a great age in 
1746, having made the acquaintance of Gray^^ 

Rowe, whose translation of Lucan obtained the, at first sight, 
astounding sentence from Johnson that it is "one of the greatest 
productions of English poetry," was of a good Devonshire family, 
but was born in Bedfordshire in 1673, his father being a lawyer of 
some note. Nicholas was sent to Westminster, but not to any uni- 
versity, his father thinking it better for him to enter the Middle 
Temple at once, that he might, it may be supposed, avoid the snares 
of the Muses. Yet, if he escaped the fate of Otway and Lee, it was 
not because O.xford and Cambridge had no part in him, but because 
he had independent means to which his father's death gave him early 
access, and because, instead of the rough days of Charles or the 
rougher ones of "Grub Street," the palmy time of Anne and the 
earliest George fell to his lot. He was five-and-twenty when his first 
play, the Ambitious Stepmother, appeared, and he followed it up with 
Tamerlane (a glorification of "The Deliverer," for Rowe was a Whig), 
1702, and the Fair Penitent, 1703. Jane Shore, which had been 

1 Works, 2 vols. London, 1721. 



CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 505 

preceded by others, appeared in 1714. Rowe was made Poet-Laureate 
at the accession of Geoi'ge I., and received two or three other and 
more profitable posts, one of which, the surveyorship of the London 
Customs, brought him nearer Chaucer than his verse. He died in 
1718. Pope said he had no heart; others speak well enough of him. 

Johnson's descrijDtion of Rowe's plays, which is not so extravagant 
as his encomium of the Pharsalia, admits that there are not in 
them ''any deep search into nature, any accurate discriminations of 
kindred qualities, or a nice display of passion in its progress. All is 
general and refined. But his reputation comes from the reasonable- 
ness of some of his scenes, the elegance of his diction, and the suavity 
of his verse." The elegance of all but the best Queen Anne diction, 
and the suavity of all but all Queen Anne verse, have long palled, 
and Jvowe is therefore much forgotten ; nor need he perhaps be 
disinterred. Congreve's one tragedy is more often consulted to see 
what is the context which Johnson praised so highly than for any other 
reason. Few need go farther. Southerne's two masterpieces. The 
Fatal Marriage (1694) and Oroo7ioko (1696), are perhaps more un- 
known still, despite the traditional fame of great actresses in Isabella 
and Imoinda, the constant references in contemporary and rather later 
literature to both, and the jokes made on the unlucky second title of 
The Fatal Marriage. They have much less elegance of diction than 
the work of either Rowe or Congreve, but much greater tragic quality ; 
being, in fact, Otway a little further prosed. 

The Appius and Virginia of John Dennis, the critic ; the Dis- 
tressed Motlier of Addison's friend Philips ; the Phadra and Hip- 
polytus of his other friend, " Rag " Smith, owe such shadowy repute as 
they have to accident, and in the two latter cases to Addison's not 
unamiable habit of steadily puffing his friends. None of them, nor 
any tragedy written for genei-ations afterwards for the stage, has real 
merit. ^ 

1 A dramatic growth of this time, the Opera, derived partly from the Masque, 
partly from the "entertainments" of Davenant, deserves notice. Dryden, here 
as usual, gave remarkable examples of it — Albion and Albaiiius (1685) and Kinj^ 
Arthur (1691) —while most of his contemporaries down to D'Urfey affected it 
more or less. By degrees the serious and "heroic" Opera gave place, in the 
eighteenth century more particularly, to the comic, the partialities of Rich the 
manager, and the immense success of Gay's Beggar's Opera, helping this deter- 
mination not a little. The type produced, or gave a home to, some excellent 
songs, but was otherwise not of much literary moment. 



CHAPTER III 

THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 

Tendency of Restoration prose — Its pioneers — Cowley's prose — Dryden — 
Temple — Tillotson — Halifax — Sprat — The Royal Society and style — Ban- 
yan — His four chief things — The English Rogue — Thomas Burnet — Glan- 
vill — The Diarists — Evelyn — Pepys — Roger North — Minors — Locke — 
Degradation of style at the close of the century — L'Estrange — Collier — 
Tom Brown — Dunton 

In the last two chapters the tone of the history has had to be too 
often apologetic. In poetry nothing but Dryden's own work and a 
few songs by others was added to our really precious possessions ; in 
drama the best tragedies have to be praised by allowance ; and though 
the best comedies need none in point of wit — and, indeed, in that 
respect occupy a position unsurpassed and hardly approached — they 
are far from invulnerable in point of construction, and absolutely at 
the mercy of their critics in tone, temper, and even presentation of 
nature. 

In the third department, that of prose-writingj the age can hold 
its head far higher. It is true that here also we cannot give it that 
absolute supremacy which some other periods, in this or that depart- 
Tendencyof '"'"'dtj ™'iy claim. We Cannot say that its prose is in all 
Restoration ways and for all purposes the best prose^ we may and 
must admit a regretful looking back ter the prose of 
Browne and Milton, or a consolatory looking forward to the prose of 
Shelley and Landor ; we must confess that here as everywhere the 
fall of the poetic spirit, the neap of inspiration, the' preference of the 
merely practical and the merely prosaic, is apparent. But there is to 
be set against these things a great practical achievement. j/Until 
1660 it cannot be seriously maintained that England posses^iS^, or 
ever had possessed, a prose style suited for those miscellaneous and 
average purposes which, after all, prose is chiefly meant to subserve. 
Of the style of no earlier English writer except Hooker can it be said 
that it is even conceivably applicable at once to plain narrative, to argu- 
mentative exposition, to the handling of practical business. \ We only 

506 J 



CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 509 

after previous use of it is changed for another ; colloquiab'sms grow 
fewer; the grammar throughout is corrected and straightened. 
These things are interesting not only because they show the direc- 
tion of the general literary current, but also as a protest against that 
exaggeration and degradation of the plain style itself which, as we 
shall see, set in during the later years of Dryden's own life, and 
necessitated the further " correctness " of Addison and Swift. 

Dryden's remaining prose works are very considerable, but 
except his translations (mostly hackwork in the Roman Catholic or 
Royalist interest) they almost entirely take the form of essays, and 
no doubt powerfully influenced the general taste for that class of 
composition. The last — the Preface to the Fables — is almost as 
much the capital example of his style in prose as the Fables them- 
selves are of his style in verse. And there is no doubt that for 
strictly prosaic purposes this style is one of the most admirable in 
English — correct, but not in the least thin or tame ; with a vocabu- 
lary itself almost daringly enriched from foreign tongues, and seldom 
hesitating at an archaism or a colloquialism when necessary, but 
thoroughly organised and "in hand"; of extraordinary ease without 
either over-facility or slipshodness ; forcible without the slightest 
effort, eloquent without declamation, graceful yet thoroughly manly. 
That there are purposes for which it would not suffice, charms which 
it does not possess, atmospheres which it cannot give, is all perfectly 
true. But Dryden does not pretend to give us these things : he gives 
us what he has, and we can go elsewhere for what he has not. 
Meanwhile the purposes for which his own style is suited are perhaps 
more numerous, and the purposes for which it is distinctly unsuited 
fewer, than in the case of any other English prose-writer, save only 
Southey. 

Sir William Temple was a slightly older man than Dryden, 
having been born in 1628. He was a native of London, but had 
connections with Ireland, where his father was Master of the Rolls. 
He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and 
fell in love early with Dorothy Osborne, daughter of the ^^^ ^' 
Royalist governor of Guernsey, who wrote him some of the most 
cliarming letters in English, and whom he afterwards married, though 
afier much opposition, for his own party, or rather his father's, was 
tlie Parliamentary. After the Restoration he fell into political, 
especially diplomatic employment, was sent to Munster, negotiated 
the Triple Alliance, and did much other work. In the later years 
of Charles he was tried in home politics, but was less fortunate, being 
perhaps too squeamish and certainly too timid. For the last twenty 
years of his life, which ended unhappily in 1699 (having been preceded 
by that of his wife and son, the latter in very painful circumstances), 



5IO THE AUGUSTAN AGES hook via 

he lived in retirement at Slieen and Moor Park in Surrey, acting 
sometimes as the adviser, though never as the minister, of William 
of Orange, harbouring Swift and " Stella," mixing, not too happily 
for himself, in the '" Ancient and Modern " dispute, and gardening. 
Temple's works ^ are mainly occasional, and the best of them are 
letters and essays ; for he, like all his fellows, shows the strong bent 
of the time towards the essay form. His style, at its best extremely 
engaging, manifests the new form — plain, but carefully balanced 
and polished. From the agreeable nature of the subjects, and the 
air of gentlemanly but not too patronising condescension which 
it displays, it exercised great influence on a generation which thor- 
oughly respected "quality." Once (in the thousand timi ?■, quoted 
close of his Essay on Poetry) Temple went higher than Dryden, 
higher than any one of his own school, in developing the music of 
prose ; in the context of this and in many other places he goes very 
high. 

John Tillotson- was a Yorkshire man, the son of a violently 
Protestant clothier, and was born in 1630. He was educated at 
Clare Hall, Cambridge, took orders, and after the Restoration ap- 
peared as a Presbyterian at the Savoy Conference, but 
was no extremist and did not ''go out." As preacher 
of Lincoln's Inn, prebendary of St. Paul's, and then Dean of it, he 
acquired a great reputation for eloquence as well as for moderate 
liberalism — as we should now call it — in politics and theology. But 
he was highly respected by all parties during the reigns of Charles 
and James, and he forfeited this respect with the Tories, not by his 
Whiggery, but Ijy accepting Sancroft's archbishopric despite, it would 
appear, his own better reason and conscience. He died in 1694. It 
was mainly because the older style, in the hands of South, Barrow, 
and other great preachers, kept hold of the pulpit longer than of 
other departments of prose, that Tillotson acquired his reputation for 
style. Those who go to him now for that quality will probably be a 
good deal disappointed. He is very fairly clear and easy ; but he 
has neither the strength and variety of Dryden, nor the music of 
Temple, nor the crisp elegance of Halifax. 

With respect to the last named it is proper to observe that the 
work 3 in virtue of which he appears here, though there is no reasc/n- 
able doubt of his authorship of it, is not attributed to him on certa'n 
documentary evidence. George Savile, who was born 
of an old Yorkshire family in 1633, and succeeded to 
a baronetcy at eiglit years old, became a member of Parliament at 
the Restoration. He received a peerage as Lord Savile and Viscount 

1 4 vols. London, 1757. 
2 IVorl-s, 10 vols. London, 1820. ^ Miscellanies, London 3704- 



CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYD EN — PROSE 515 

literary senses as he has in the PilgrittCs Progress^ and he probably 
did not intend to do so. The piece is, hke everything of his, fault- 
lessly written in its own style, and abounds with fine passages. But 
the subject is both too vast and too vague for the particular treatment, 
and except for the gusto with which the old soldier tells of the 
military operations against Mansoul, the personal note is wanting, or 
at best emerges fitfully. 

Although it may seem strange that the astonishing literary 
excellence of the Life and Death of Mr. Badinan should have ever 
escaped any competent critic, yet it may be doubted whether many 
people knew it till the late Mr. Froude did justice to it fifteen or 
twenty years ago.^ It is not a very long dialogue between Mr. Wise- 
man and Mr. Attentive, divided into chapters, and recounting the 
ungodly but successful life of a hero who is the very opposite of 
Christian. It has been most unnecessarily and unreasonably regarded 
as a sort of third part by contrast of the Progress (which would argue 
an artistic sense in Bunyan as weak as we know his to have been 
strong), and as, in part at least, a second autobiographical fiction — 
which refutes itself. But to foist " problems " into a story of such 
perfect clearness is quite unpardonable. The style is perhaps 
Bunyan's best — less vivid than that of the Pilgrim'' s Progress, but 
with even more of the special excellences of prose. Although Mr. 
Badman deserves his name with almost superhuman thoroughness, 
yet Bunyan entirely escapes sheer exaggeration, and even resists the 
temptation to end with a lurid death-bed. Nay, though his sense of 
poetical and moral justice will not let him represent Badman as 
prosperous to the very end, yet he does not insist overmuch on 
worldly retribution. Short as it is, the piece is abundantly diversified 
with episodes and ornament — that story of " old Tod," told in twenty 
lines, and told perfectly, which Mr. Browning has characteristically 
amplified and exaggerated into "Ned Bratts," being only one of 
them. There are very strong suggestions of Thackeray (who had 
pretty certainly read it) in Mr. Badman., and it is scarcely an 
exaggeration to say that, this once printed, the English Novel in its 
most characteristic form, as opposed to the Romance, was founded. 
The little book itself is indeed rather the sceha7-io in dialogue of such 
a novel than the novel itself, but all the essentials are there. From 
Bunyan to Defoe (who must have known his predecessor well) there 
is only a slight development of method, with a considerable drop in 
style ; from Bunyan here to Richardson and Fielding the advance is 
very much slighter than it looks. 

The allegorical form and the strongly religious purport of the 

1 In his monograph on Bunyan for the " English Men of Letters " Series. 



5i6 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

Pilgrini's Progress itself have made some demur to its being ranked 
as certainly a link, and perhaps the very original link, starting the 
chain of the greater English novel ; but this seems to be a somewhat 
unnecessary scruple. A religious novel is still a novel, and though 
allegory is an old form of fiction, and the novel proper a comparatively 
new one, we must not rule out allegories as such from the latter 
class. 

Indeed, if, discarding arbitrary axioms, we confine ourselves to the 
real qualities of the novel, we shall find it very hard to discover one 
which is not eminently present in the Pilgrini's Progress. It has 
a sufficient and regular plot in each of its parts, the two being duly 
connected — a plot rather of the continuous or straight-hne than of 
the interwoven or circular order, but still amply sufficient. The 
action and interest of this plot are quite lavishly supported by 
character; indeed, the Pilgrim's Progress is the first prose work of 
fiction in which this all-powerful tool, whicli had hitherto been chiefly 
used by the dramatist, and to a less intense, but more extensive, 
degree by the poet, was applied. And Bunyan, with a bound, came 
very near perfection in it. There is hardly a trace (except in 
characters like Evangelist, where it is proper) of the misty generality 
which we find in the Noly J Tar. Everybody — from main characters 
like Christian and Greatheart and Mercy to mere sketches like 
Atheist and By-ends and Brisk, and the delectable person who de- 
scribes the party at " Madam Wanton's," where they " were as merry 
as the maids" — is alive. The description and the dialogue are used 
to further the narrative, in the precise way in which novel differs 
from drama — ^the description being given by the author, not by the 
characters or the stage directions — and are mixed and tempered 
with an art only inferior to that shown in the projection of character 
which they help. If we are told that the Pilgrini's Progress is not 
a novel, it will be proper to ask what is a novel, that having 
obtained an admitted example we may compare it with Bunyan's 
work. 

The Pilgrini's Progress has long been, and it may be hoped will 
always be, well enough known in England. But for something like 
four generations after* its first appearance, its popularity, though 
always great, was, so to speak, subterranean and almost contraband. 
It is probable that even when it was most sniffed at by academic 
criticism, it was brought by means of nursemaids to the knowledge 
of children. But it was not till quite the end of the eighteenth 
century, or even the beginning of the nineteenth, that it was made 
free of the study as it had long been of the cottage and the nursery. 
Orthodoxy objected to Bunyan's dissent ; dissent to his literary and 
artistic gifts; latitudinarians to his religious fervour; the somewhat 



CHAiMU THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 517 

priggish refinement of Addisonian and Popian etiquette to his ver- 
nacular language and his popular atmosphere ; scholars to his sup- 
posed want of education. And so the greatest prose-book of the late 
seventeenth century in English had, for nearly a hundred and fifty 
years, the curious fate of constantly exercising influence without ever 
achieving praise, or even notice, from those whose business it was to 
give both. A curious fate certainly, but not an unenviable. 

The reluctance to acknowledge the place of Bunyan in the history 
of the novel has perhaps partly accounted for the undue importance 
sometimes attached to work so infinitely inferior, not merely in 
moral respectability but in literary value, to his as that of 
Richard Head, the author of the English Rogue.^ This '^^^RoguH''' 
book does possess a certain historical value. It forms 
a definite link between the pamphlet-novels of the Elizabethan time 
in the wide sense and (through the novelettes of Afra Behn) 
the work of Defoe. It represents the first elaborate attempt to 
transplant the Spanish picaresque novel, and such French imitations 
of it as Sorel's Francion, into English ; and it is also interesting as 
embodying the attractions of representation of foreign countries and 
manners with those of the delineation of manners at home. It shows 
further that extremely strong vernacular and popular, not to say 
vulgar, element which we have had, and shall have, to notice so 
often in this particular period. But it has hardly any intrinsic 
merit ; and, if it had not followed the moral license of its origmals, it 
may be questioned whether it would have had many readers or any 
panegyrists. For its want of decency is almost the only feature which 
takes it out of the commonplace ; it hardly attempts plot, unless the 
rudimentary device of making the hero occasionally meet with persons 
he has met before may be dignified by that name ; it has no merits 
of dialogue or description, and it is entirely wanting in the virtue 
which, as we have seen, Bunyan possesses in so eminent a degree — 
the virtue of character-drawing. 

Thomas Burnet and Joseph Glanvill are the chief exponents of 
the gorgeous style in prose, who were born, later than Dryden himself, 
in the seventeenth century. Burnet (who must be very carefully 
distinguished from his namesake Gilbert) was a York- 
shire man, and his birth-year was 1635. He was Burne^^ 
educated at Northallerton Grammar School and at 
Clare Hall, Cambridge, whence he moved to Christ's and became 
Fellow of that College in 1657. He took his share of University 
work, but also travelled much abroad as a private tutor, and in 1685 

1 4 vols. London, 1665, sq. Reprinted recently, London, n.d. Head, who was 
a person of some education, and a copious bookseller's hack, is responsible only 
for the tirst part of it. 



5i8 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

he became Master of the Charterhouse. He had already published 
in Latin (1680) and English (1684) his Theoria Sacra, with its sequel 
the De Conflagratione, and he did little else in literature, though he 
did not die till 171 5. His position at the Charterhouse gave him 
the opportunity, which he duly took, of resisting James II. 's attack 
on the Church. Burnet's book 1 is a fanciful explanation of cosmogony 
and cosmolysis, in which the Deluge is the great event in the past and 
the final conflagration the great event of the future. From this point 
of view it is chiefly interesting as an attempt to combine the nascent 
interest in physical science with the expiring tendency to imaginative 
romance. Something of the same mixture appears in the manner, 
for there are touches of the vernacularity, and even the meanness, 
which was invading style. But on the whole the older magnificence 
prevails, and Burnet has a just, though probably rather a vague, 
repute as commanding real eloquence of description, marred at times 
by a tawdriness which reminds us that we are in the half-century of 
Lee, not in that of Shakespeare, but showing in prose not a little of 
the redeeming splendour which Lee shows in verse. 

Glanvill, whom the echoing magnificence of a sentence from 
him, prefixed to Poe's Ligeia, may have made known to many more 
than have read him in his originals, was born at Plymouth in 1636, 
went to Oxford in 1652, took orders at the Restoration, 
became Vicar of Frome, F.R.S., and Prebendary of 
Worcester, and died in 1680. His Scepsis Scientifica^- an extended 
edition of the earlier Vanity of Dogmatising (1661), appeared in 
1665 ; SaddjicisviKs TriitDipIiatus, a defence of belief in witches, in 
1666; and Essays in 1678. Glanvill is a weaker and less poetical 
Browne, upon whom it is probably not wrong to suspect that he 
modelled himself. He has, as a rule, neither the power nor the 
music of Sir Thomas, but sometimes he comes not too far off. 

One of the most remarkable divisions of prose at the time is 
that supplied by the Diarists and Memoir-writers, of whom Samuel 
Pepys occupies a position unparalleled in English, if not in any 
. tongue, with Evelyn and Roger North for considerable 
seconds, and no small number of other writers — Sir John 
Reresby, Abraham de la Pryme, the somewhat earlier Mrs. Hutchin- 
son, Lady Fanshawe (indeed, tlie letter-writers proper might be here 
included), and others to follow. But Pepys, Evelyn, and North are 
those who have hold on history. 

The two first were friends, but Evelyn, far less distinctly original as 
a writer, was the elder in years and by far the higher in social position. 
He was born at the family seat of Wotton, in Surrey (of which, with 

1 7th edition, 2 vols. London, 1759. 
- Edited by John Owen, London, 1885. 



CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 519 



other property at Sayes Court, Deptford, he was afterwards to be 
possessor), in 1620, went to school at Lewes, and to college at Balliol, 
but was just young enough to escape actual participation 
in the Civil War. He was a consistent Royalist, and 
married the daughter of a still stronger one, Sir Richard Browne. 
But Evelyn was no Quixote, and was not molested during the Common- 
wealth. Both at that time and afterwards he devoted himself to 
gardening and arboriculture (of which his well-known, if not now much 
read, Sylva was the outcome), physical science (he was an early member 
of the Royal Society), and a good many other matters. He was a 
fervent Anglican and faithful to monarchical principles, though the 
dissoluteness of the Restoration gave him no small grief. He was 
nearly eighty-seven when he died, in 1706, and his work, published 
and unpublished, was very large. But even the Sylva has long 
ceased to be read, and the books most likely to keep his name in 
remembrance, his Diary '^ and his Memoir- of Margaret Blagge (Mrs. 
Godolphin), were not published till more than a century after his 
death. 

The interest of these arises chiefly from their matter. In them 
and in all his work Evelyn's style is that of a thoroughly cultivated 
gentleman who, on the one hand, has had the full education of his 
time, and on the other is familiar with the language of its best society. 
But he has little idiosyncrasy of composition or expression. He has 
neither the splendour of the old style nor the precision and telling 
point of the new. But in the little book giving the life and letters 
of Margaret Blagge (the first wife of Godolphin the Lord Treasurer 
to be, who passed unscathed through the contaminations of Whitehall, 
where she was a maid of honour, and died in the prime of her youth 
and beauty), a half-platonic, half-paternal affection has suffused warmth 
and colour over Evelyn's usually rather tepid and neutral fashion of 
writing. And the Diary, though there are many more amusing books 
of the kind, is justly famous for the fulness, variety, and fidelity of 
its records, while, not very rarely, in such passages as the well-known 
account of the Great Fire, and the still better known one of Whitehall 
just before the death of Charles IL, the subject once more rouses the 
writer to real strength and effect. But even then he is hardly 
individual. 

There is no more individual writer in English than Samuel Pepys, 
his friend, though Evelyn patronised Pepys, as Pepys patronised 
Dryden. He was born in i6xt,, of a familv settled in 
the district of Cambridge and Huntingdon, and, as 
was not uncommon in the seventeenth century, touching the peerage 

1 Ed. Bray" 2 vols. 410. (2nd ed. 1819), and in divers forms since. 

2 First published by Samue! Wilberforce, and reprinted since. 



S20 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

and the landed gentry on one side, retail town trade and the lower 
middle class on the other. His connection with Montague, after- 
wards Earl of Sandwich, was the foundation of Pepys's fortunes, 
which, after being very humble before the Restoration, were mightily 
bettered by his appointment to the post of Clerk of the Acts of the 
Navy. He was Secretary of the Admiralty later, and Member of 
Parliament ; and though he lost his positions, once at the Popish 
Plot time and finally at the Revolution, he always enjoyed a great 
reputation as a scholar, virtuoso, and expert in matters naval. In 
fact, though he was not much (he was somewhat) superior to the 
loose ideas of his time as to what was and what was not malversa- 
tion of public money, Pepys was far more diligent, able, and 
patriotic than most of his fellows. He seems to have been in more 
than conventional phrase " universally respected " up to his death in 
1703. He left to his college, Magdalene, at Cambridge (his school 
was St. Paul's), an invaluable collection of books, including ballads 
and old MSS., of which he was one of the earliest collectors; and 
his Memoirs 7- elating to the State of the Navy (1690) was and is a 
very meritorious production. Even his letters, of which we have 
considerable numbers, ^ though as yet no complete printed collection, 
present him in no other light than that of a man of business with 
rather versatile tastes for music, science, and (in part) literature, but 
of no special idiosyncrasy either of genius or character. 

In 1825, however, Lord Braybrooke, whose family was connected 
hereditarily with Magdalene, published in part a Diary ^ which Pepys 
had included in his bequest to that society. It had been kept in 
cipher by the author for about ten years from a period just before 
the Restoration, till anxiety about the state of his eyes broke it off, 
and probably the death of his wife checked its resumption. She was 
Elizabeth St. Michel, a pretty girl and of gentle French extraction, 
but penniless, ill-educated, apparently (though it inust be admitted 
she was sorely tried) of no very sweet disposition, frivolous, and un- 
refined. They had made a boy-and-girl marriage, and, though a most 
unfaithful husband, he seems to have been, with perhaps one interval, 
never quite out of love with her. The Diary was published by Lord 
Braybrooke with very large omissions ; fifty years afterwards part of 
these were supplied ; and twenty years later again the whole, with 
some verbal blanks, pudoris causa, was issued. The successive 

1 Chiefly to be found in Life, fo/iriials, and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, 
ed. Smith, 2 vols. London, 1841, which also contains the Tangier Diary. By some 
mischance or misconduct the bulk of the letters did not reach Magdalene, and are 
scattered, while many, no doubt, are lost. 

- The latest and completest (but still not quite complete) edition is that of Mr. 
H. B. Wheatley, London, 1893-96, 8 vols, of text, witli a gtlT of index, etc., to 
follow. 



CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 521 

revelations have considerably blackened Pepys's character, and have 
increased the surprise of those who can afford any surprise at a 
constantly renewed phenomenon, that he should have not merely 
written but preserved, and with extraordinary precautions insured 
the preservation of, the document. But they have rather increased 
than lessened the estimate of his peculiar genius. In the place of, 
or rather inside of, the decorous, diligent official and virtuoso who 
was for forty years respected by the scrupulous Evelyn, and who 
majestically congratulates Dryden on the comfort afforded to Pepys by 
his Good Parson, '• after the sight of so many lewd originals," we have 
an almost entirely different person. The interest in some literature, 
in science, in music, in art, remains ; the diligence is seen to have 
been by no means merely affected; the shrewd business-sense, and 
even the determination that, though Pepys shall be well paid for 
serving the King, yet the King shall not be ill-served, remain. But 
likewise many strange new things appear. We find a man insatiable 
of scandal, petty pleasures, frivolities of dress, and the like ; intensely 
selfish and sometimes even brutal, though good-natured in the main ; 
the arrantest of snobs; stingy to his wife and lavish to himself; a 
thorough libertine, and resorting to the specially bad trick of using his 
official position to gratify his libertinage ; sometimes almost cowardly, 
constantly jealous, petty in every way. 

Yet we never dislike Pepys, and we seldom despise him. Nor 
is this merely due to the fact that every rational person remembers 
and allows for the bearing of a certain text about casting the first 
stone. It is due first to the fact that Pepys is intensely human ; 
secondly to the fact that within his limits (and they are many and 
sharply drawn, so that he could not like Shakespeare, could not like 
Butler, could appreciate neither poetry nor humour at the best of 
either) he was intensely sensitive to impressions ; most of all to the 
fact that, for whatsoever reason — perhaps because of the utter absence 
of restraint and respect of persons — he can express these impressions 
as no one else has done. The Diary deals literally with the entire 
occupations of a busy life for nearly ten years. Nothing is too 
small, nothing too mean, hardly anything even too disgusting, for 
Pepys to record; he does not know what tedium means, and yet — 
an almost unique instance — he never produces it. His innumerable 
morning draughts and evening suppers ; the oaths which at times 
interfered with them ; the books which he so diligently bought, if he 
did not always taste them ; his more or less unlawful amusements ; 
his friendships; his enmities; his very official business — all these 
things and many others acquire in passing under his hands a sort 
of varnish, or, more properly speaking, a sort of saturation of immor- 
tality. It is impossible to define with any accuracy how this is 



522 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

communicated. Part may be due to the short, stenographic expression 

necessitated by his cipher, to the constant shock of surprise at his 

astounding frankness, to the raciness which his observation of the 

actual fashion of speech' of the time imparts. But there is a residuum 

which cannot be accounted for by any of these things, or by the 

interest, intrinsic or accidental, of his subjects ; and this residuum is 

genius. About genius the less said the better. To acknowledge it 

and enjoy it is always the better part of criticism. 

The most interesting of the Memoir-writers, next to Pepys and 

Evelyn, — indeed, more interesting, if less important, than the latter, 

— is Roger North, a younger son of a family which made no small 

,.T , show in history and politics during the sixteenth, seven- 
Roger North 

teenth, and eighteenth centuries in England. Roger 

was born "about" 1650 (for, copious as he is, he neglects dates 
strangely), and lived till 1733, most of his written work being the fruit 
of his later years. It consists of Lives'^ of liimself and his three 
brothers (the Lord Keeper Guildford, Dr. John North, Master of 
Trinity, and Sir Dudley, the Turkey merchant), and of the Exainen^ 
an important Tory vindication of the proceedings of Charles II. 's 
reign against the incoming Whiggery of the eighteenth century. The 
Lives are tlie more interesting; but the whole is written in a curious 
and very piquant style, strangely free from any of the new classicism, 
but as strangely crossed between the older conceit and the new slang. 
North is Harrington plus L'Estrange ; he will write " This was nuts 
to the old lord," "That flowed in on him like an orage^'' "The 
Common Pleas thought to have nicked them," with no fear of Dryden 
earlier and Addison later, and much as his collateral ancestor Sir 
Thomas would have done. Which, together with the interesting 
things he has to sa}-, gives him no mean position. He liked painting 
and yachting as well as the toughest quillets of the old law, and was 
altogether a character. 

Many other writers have obtained a more or less secure footing 
in histories, more or less elaborate, of English literature as represent- 
ing the prose of this time. The great, but never fully co-ordinated 
or developed, powers of Andrew Marvell showed themselves 

Minors. .,.,', . , . . . ,, 

in his later, and mainly satiric, stage m prose as well as 
in verse. Algernon Sidney (i62o?-83) has received for his literature 
some of that bounty of praise which in politics has turned a venal 
partisan into a martyred patriot ; but the genius of his family was 
not entirely lost in him. George Fox (1624-90), the first of Quakers, 
has been rightly selected as a sort of "prose Bunyan." The platitudi- 
nousness of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1626-91) celebrated, or 

1 Ed. Jessopp, 3 vols. London, 1890. 2 ^to, London, 1740. 



CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 523 

rather immortalised, by Swift, is an unintentional reduction to the 
absurd of the qualities which Sprat insisted on as necessary to the 
scientiiic man. Anthony [a] Wood (1632-95), author of the great 
Atlienae Oxonienscs, was a Pepys who bestowed upon his mother 
University and her notables and notabilia what the diarist devoted to 
dinner, and supper, and the wives of shipwrights in the Deptford 
yard, and taverns, and theatres, and the Navy accounts. And 
Anthony's senior, survivor, friend, but inferior, John Aubrey (1626-97) 
was still more like Pepys, and has preserved much of such gossip as 
we have about great and small men of his own time and a little before. 
Edward Stillingfleet (1635-99) ^^'^^ '^ strong divine and scholar, with 
a style inadequate to his learning and his logic. Gilbert Burnet (1643- 
1715) was a Whig Clarendon, without the genius and the art. The 
Scots prose of the time is, despite the decadence of Scottish litera- 
ture, not unworthily represented by Sir George Mackenzie (1636-91), 
a great lawyer and statesman, an old-fashioned but vivid writer, and, 
as we know both from Dryden and his own writings, an excellent 
critic; and by Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716), whose personality is 
embalmed by his saying or quotation about the ballads of a nation ; 
and by his not quite senseless crotchet about enslaving beggars. Of 
all these it would be interesting, but is impossible, to say more here ; 
but something in detail must be added of John Locke, and a few 
words about the growth of periodicals and the vulgarisation of style 
towards the close of the century, especially as shown in L'Estrange, 
Collier, Dunton, and "the facetious Tom Brown." 

Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset, under the shadow of 
the Mendips, in 1632. He too, like South and Dryden, was a 
pupil of Busby's at Westminster, and, like South, he went to Christ 
Church. He availed himself of his studentship to settle 
down there in the study of medicine and philosophy. 
He lost this quiet haven through his friendship with Shaftesbury, 
but he had means and was able to live, chiefly abroad, till the 
Revolution restored him and provided him with divers offices, espe- 
cially a Commissionership of Trade and Plantations. He had pub- 
lished Letters ofi Toleration before the expulsion of James, but his 
principal works, the great Essay on the Human Understanding and 
the Treatise of Government, appeared just afterwards in 1690, and the 
Thoughts on Education in 1693. He died in 1704.^ 

With the matter of Locke's work, important as it is, we have 
here little or nothing to do. It concerns us mainly as showing the 
degradation, the general lowering of thought and ideal, which has so 

1 There is no good complete edition of Locke, though there are several last- 
century collections. The Essay can be found cheaply in Bohn's Library, and with 
all necessary apparatus in Professor Campbell Eraser's edition. 



524 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

much to do with the changes of literature at this time. Locke has 
abundance of common sense ; he is not (whatever his followers may 
have been) irreligious ; he is kindly and not ungenerous in tone and 
sentiment ; nor does it appear that he himself desired any violent 
changes in Church or State. But he is wholly, and in a slightly un- 
pleasant sense, practical. If he objects to innate ideas, it is not so 
much because his acuteness perceives certain obvious difficulties in 
admitting them as because they are above his range, out of his ken, 
something that does not come within the almost (not quite) pure 
sensationalism of his thought. If in the same way he objects to the 
high-flying theory of hereditary and absolute monarchy, it is not 
merely because absolute monarchy has been abused, or merely be- 
cause he sees objection to it, but because it is again " too high " for 
him, because its poetical and romantic attractions, as well as the 
logical merits of its theory, which appeal even to a person so little 
poetical as Hobbes, are quite out of his plane and orbit. Yet again, 
if he objects to the older and classical education, it is because it is 
in danger of interfering with business, because it puts flighty notions 
into men's heads. No very great figure of the age really expresses its 
banality as does Locke. The eyes of Dryden are still caught by 
the brave translunary things which all great poets must perceive ; 
the fresh attraction of the then novel mathematical and physical dis- 
coveries inflames Barrow earlier and Newton later; there is an 
intoxication of satire in Butler, an intoxication of God, and of human- 
ity, and of the unseen in Bunyan, a kind of intoxication of physical 
pleasure and amusement even in Pepys. But Locke is nothing if 
not sober: he is eminently of such stuiT as dreams are not made of. 

And the style is, once more, the very man. It would be grossly 
unjust to despise Locke as a writer ; his merits of clear apperception 
and presentation, of exact adjustment of the method of appeal to 
the person appealed to, the range and fertility of his illustration, the 
cogency of his attack if the general principles of it are granted, the 
absence of pretension and quackery — these are things too rare and 
too good in themselves not to receive due acknowledgment. But it 
is certainly not wrong to see in him literary (we need say nothing 
more of his philosophical) influences which, while they may have 
been valuable at the time as helping to clear away some things once 
good and great, but now in their decadence, helped to bring about 
worse things in time to come. To no single man is that obstinate 
Philistinism of thought and expression, which is the besetting sin of 
eighteenth-century literature, due so much as to Locke. The dignity, 
indeed, of his subject, his genuine learning, his modesty, his in- 
tellectual acumen, kept him from being actually vulgar. But he was 
the cause of infinite vulgarity in others, and his style of itself incurs 



CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYD EN — PROSE 527 

John Dunton's Athenian Oracle with a " Lacedaemonian " imitation 
which was much more amusing; and he wrote poems, squibs, trans- 
lations, every sort of light work, with no small scholarship, with 
abundance of wit and humour, but unluckily with a contempt of 
decency beside which even the dramatists of his time look modest. 
The collections ^ of his work vary in bulk and contents, and it is 
probable that critical authentication of them is impossible. 

The last of the four, John Dunton, possessed perhaps the least 
purely literary capacity, but is not the least important in history. 
He was born in 1659, and was descended from a line of clergymen, 
but was recalcitrant to the succession, and became a 
bookseller. In 1682 he married Elizabeth Annesley, 
" dear Iris," daughter of a Nonconformist divine of some fame, and 
sister of Mrs. Samuel Wesley and Mrs. Defoe. Dunton was a 
strong Whig, a man with a genius for " rambling," which carried 
him to America and to the Continent, and deeply bitten with the 
mania of the time for " Projects," of which his brother-in-law 
Defoe has left an interesting memorial in his Essay thereon. 
Dunton's most remarkable Project that took effect was the already 
mentioned Athenian Meraij-y^ collected and selected in book form 
later as the Athenian Oracle, which anticipated on a magnificent 
scale the "answers to correspondents" not yet quite obsolete. His 
most important book was his Life and Errors^ ^ a book which only its 
long-windedness, and the fact that its author's eccentricity here and 
there diverges into clear madness, exclude from the brief list of 
English autobiographies of the first class. After the death of " dear 
Iris " he married " dear Valeria," alias Sarah Nicholas, an heiress ; 
but this union was less happy. He wrote and partly published a 
great amount of matter, a pamphlet against Harley and St. John, 
JVeck or Nothing, being the chief item, and died as late as 1733, in 
obscurity and (apparently) distress. He is much less colloquial than 
those who have been mentioned before him, but is full of the curious 
domestic detail which also distinguishes the time, especially in Non- 
conformist writing ; and he furnishes us with abundant and some- 
times interesting particulars about booksellers, printers, authors, 
divines, and public men generally. 

II use one in 4 vols. Dublin, 1778. 

2 Ed. Nichols, 2 vols. 1818. The Athenian Oracle, Athenian Sport, etc., z.nd. 
their follower, the British Apollo, voluminous collections of question and answer, 
are useful and not unamusing documents. Those who fear to plunge at large into 
them may content themselves with a well-edited selection fi-om the first-named by 
John Underhill, London, 1892. 



CHAPTER IV 

QUEEN ANNE PROSE 

Swift — His life — His verse — His prose — His quality and achievement — The 
Essayists — Steele — His plays — Addison's lite — His miscellaneous work — 
His and Steele's Essays — Bentley — Middleton — Arbuthnot — Atterbury — 
Bolingbroke — Butler and other divines — Shaftesbury — Mandeville — 
Berkeley — Excellence of his style — Defoe 

John Dunton, the eccentric bookseller mentioned at the close of 
the last chapter, refers to a certain "scoffing Tubman," with whose 
identity neither he, extensive and peculiar as was his knowledge of 
literary London, nor almost any one else, was then 
acquainted. The reference is, of course, to the Tale of a 
Tub, pubhshed anonymously in 1704 — the first great book, either 
in prose or verse, of the eighteenth century, and in more ways than 
one the herald and champion at once of its special achievements in 
literature. Jonathan Swift,^ its author, one of the very greatest 
names in English literature, was, like his connections Dryden and 
Herrick, a plant of no very early development. He had been born as 
far back as 1667, and his earlier literary productions had been confined 
to wretched Pindaric odes, some of them contributed to Dunton's 
own papers, and drawing down upon him that traditional and 
variously quoted sentence of his great relative, "Cousin Swift, you 
will never be a [Pindaric] poet," which is said to have occasioned 
certain ill-natured retorts on Dryden later. Swift's origin, like his 
character and genius, was purely English, but an accident caused 
him to be born in Dublin, and other accidents brought about his 
education in Ireland. His father died before his birth, and his 
mother was very poor ; but his paternal uncle paid for his education 
at Kilkenny Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublin. He 
entered Trinity very early, in 1682, and seems to have been neither 

1 Swift's Works have been frequently collected, but never quite satisfactorily. 
The best edition is still Scott's ; but a new, cheap, and useful one has been begun 
in Bohn's Library. All Lives have been superseded by Sir Henry Craik's — ist ed. 
in I vol. London, 1883 ; new ed. in 2 vols. London, 1894. 

528 



CHAK IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 529 

happy nor successful there, though there may have been less disgrace 
than has sometimes been thought in his graduation speciali gratia, and 
not by the ordinary way of right, in 1686. 

He was still under twenty, and for some years found no better 
occupation than a secretaryship in the house of his distant connection. 
Sir William Temple. In 1694 he went to Ireland, was ordained, 
and received a small living, but in two years returned to 
Temple, in whose house he met " Stella," Esther John- 
son, his lifelong friend and, as seems most probable, latterly his 
wife. Temple died in 1699, leaving Swift a small legacy and his 
literary executorship. He once more returned to Ireland, acted as 
secretary to Lord-Deputy Berkeley, received some more small pre- 
ferments, though not such as he wanted, and spent the first decade 
of the century at Laracor, his chief benefice, and London, where he 
was a sort of agent for the Archbishop of Dublin. He had all this 
time been a kind of Whig in politics, but with a strong dislike to 
Whig anti-clericalism and some other differences; and about 1710 he 
joined the new Tory party under Harley and St. John, and carried on 
vigorous war against the Whigs in the Examiner, though he did not 
break personal friendship with Addison and others. His inestimable 
services during the four last years of Queen Anne were rewarded only 
with the Deanery of Dublin — it is said owing to the Queen's pious 
horror of the Tale of a Tub. Swift lived chiefly in Dublin, but with 
occasional visits to his friends in England, for more than thirty years 
longer, and the events of his life, the contests of "Vanessa" and 
" Stella " for his hand, or at least his heart, his interference with 
Irish politics, his bodily sufferings, and the end which, after five 
terrible years of madness, painful or lethargic, came in October 
1745, are always interesting and sometimes mysterious. But we 
cannot dwell on them here, though they have more to do with his 
actual literary characteristics than is often the case. His dependency 
in youth, his long sojourn in lettered leisure, though in bitterness of 
spirit, with a household the master of which was a dilettante but 
a distinctly remarkable man of letters, his suppressed but evidently 
ardent affections, his disappointment when at last he reached fame 
and the chance of power, and his long residence, with failing health, 
in a country which he hated — all these things must be taken into 
account, though cautiously, in considering his work. 

This is of very great bulk, and in parts of rather uncertain 
genuineness, for Swift was strangely careless of literary reputation, 
published for the most part anonymously, and, intense as is his idio- 
syncrasy, contrived to impress it on one or two of his 
intimate friends, notably on Arbuthnot. It consists of 
both verse and prose, but the former is rarely poetry and is at its 



530 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

best in easy vers de socieie, such as Cade^tiis and Vanessa (the record 
of his passion or fancy for Esther Vanhomrigh), "Vanbrugh's 
House," the pieces to Harley and others, and above all, the lines on 
his own death ; or else in sheer burlesque or grotesque, where he has 
seldom been equalled, as in the famous " Mrs. Harris's Petition," 
and a hundred trifles, long and short, of the same general kind. 
Poetry, in the strict and rare sense, Swift seldom or never touches ; 
his chief example of it — an example not absolutely authenticated, 
seeing that we only possess it as quoted by Lord Chesterfield — is a 
magnificent fragment about the Last Judgment. Here, and perhaps 
only here in verse, his characteristic indignation rises to poetic heat. 
Elsewhere he is infinitely ingenious and humorous in fanciftjl whim, 
and, sometimes at least, infinitely happy in expression of it, the pains 
which, no doubt partly owing to Temple's influence and example, he 
spent upon correct prose-writing being here extended and reflected 
in verse. For Swift, although not pedantically, or in the sense of 
manuals of composition, a correct writer, is so in the higher and 
better sense to a very unusual degree ; and we know that he was 
so deliberately. Several passages, especially one in the Tatler^ 
express his views on the point, and his dislike at once of the older 
luxuriance which it was impossible for a man of his time to relish, 
and of the inroad of slovenly colloquialism which we have noticed in 
the last chapter. 

Yet if Swift had been, like his patron, and perhaps in some sort 
exemplar, Temple, nothing more, or little more, than a master of form 
in prose, his position in literature would be very different from that 
which he actually .holds. His first published prose piece, 
the Dissensiotis of Athens and Rome (an application, 
according to the way of the time, to contemporary politics), contains, 
except in point of style, nothing very noticeable. But the anony- 
mous volume of 1704 is compact of very different stuff. The Battle 
of the Books, a contribution to the " Ancient and Modern " debate 
on Temple's side and in Temple's honour, is not supreme, though 
very clever, admirably written and arranged, and such as no English- 
man recently living, save Butler and Dryden, could have written, 
while Butler would have done it with more clumsiness of form, and 
Dryden with less lightness of fancy. The Tale of a Tub has 
supremacy. It may be peremptorily asserted that irreligion is 
neither intended nor involved in it. For nearly two centuries the 
ferocious controversies, first between Rome and Protestantism, then 
between different bodies of Protestants, had entirely blinded men to 
the extreme danger that the rough handling which they bestowed upon 

1 27th September 1710. 



QUEEN ANNE PROSE 531 



their enemies would recoil on the religion which underlay those enemies' 
beliefs as well as their own. And this, as well as the other danger 
of the excessive condemnation of "enthusiasm," was not seen till long 
after Swift's death. But the satire on Peter (Rome), Jack (Calvinism, 
or rather the extremer Protestant sects generally), and Martin (Luther- 
anism and Anglicanism) displays an all-pervading irony of thought, 
and a felicity of expressing that irony, which had never been seen in 
English prose before. The irony, it must be added, goes, as far as 
things human are concerned, very deep and very wide, and its zigzag 
glances at politics, philosophy, manners, the hopes and desires and 
pursuits and pleasures and pains of man, leave very little unscathed. 
There is a famous and not necessarily false story that Swift, in his 
sad later days, once exclaimed, in reference to the Tale, " What a 
genius I had when I wrote that book ! " The exclamation, if made, 
was amply justified. The Tale of a Tub is one of the very greatest 
books of the world, one of those in which a great drift of universal 
thought receives consummate literary form. 

The decade of his Whiggery (or, as it has been more accurately 
described, of his neutral state with Whig leanings) saw no great 
bulk of work, but some exquisite examples of this same irony in a 
lighter kind. This was the time of the charming Argutiient against 
Abolishing Christianity (1708) and of Swift's contributions to the 
Tatlcr, which periodical indeed owed him a great deal more than the 
mere borrowing of the noni de guerre — Isaac Bickerstaffe — which he 
had used in a series of ingenious persecutions of the almanack-maker, 
Partridge. The shorter period of Tory domination was very much 
more prolific in bulk of work, but except in the wonderful /(?//r//rt:/ to 
Stella (1710-13), which was never intended for any eye but hers 
(and the faithful •' Dingley's "), the literary interest is a little inferior. 
The Examiners are of extraordinary force and vigour; the Remarks 
on the Barrier Treaty (17 12), the Pnblic Spirit of the Whigs (1714), 
and above all the Conduet of the Allies (171 1), which Johnson so 
strangely decried, are masterly specimens of the political pamphlet. 
The largest work of this time, the History of the Four Last J 'ears of 
Queen Anne, is sometimes regarded as doubtfully genuine, though 
there is no conclusive reason for ruling it out. 

His very greatest prose work, however, dates from the last thirty 
years of his life, and especially from the third, fourth, and fifth lustres 
of this time, for the last was darkened by his filial agony, and in 
the first decade he was too marked a man to venture on writing 
what might have brought upon him the exile of Atterbury or the 
prison of Harley and Prior. He began at once, however, a curious 
kind of Irish patriotism, which was in fact nothing but an English 
Fronde. In 1724 some jobbery about a new copper coinage in 



532 THE AUGUSTAN AGES 



Ireland gave him a subject, and he availed himself of this in the 
Drapier'^s Letters with almost miraculous skill ; while two years later 
came the greatest of all his books, greater for method, range, and 
quiet mastery than even the Tale, that is to say Gulliver''s Travels. 
The short but consummate Modest Proposal for eating Irish children, 
the pair to the Argu/neiit against Abolishing Christianity, as a short 
example of the Swiftian irony, came in 1729; and the chief of his 
important works later were the delightful Polite Conversation (1738), 
probably written or at least begun much earlier, in which the ways 
and speeches of ordinary good society are reproduced with infinite 
humour and spirit, and the Directions to Servants, almost as witty, 
but more marked with Swift's ugliest fault, a coarseness of idea and 
language, which seems rather the result of positive and individual 
disease than the survival of Restoration license. 

There is no doubt that on the whole Swift's peculiar powers, 

temper, and style are shown in his one generally known book as 

well as anywhere else. The absence of the fresher, more whimsical. 

His quality ^"^^ perhaps even deeper, irony and pessimism of the Tale 

and of a Tub, and the loss of self-control indicated in the 

achievement. • ., r ii tt i i c \ 

savage misanthropy of the Houyhnhnms finale, are com- 
pensated by a more methodical and intelligible scheme, by the 
charm of narrative, by range and variety of subject, and by the 
abundance of little lively touches which that narrative suggests and 
facilitates. The mere question of the originality of the scheme is, as 
usual, one of the very slightest importance. Swift had predecessors, 
if he had not patterns, in Lucian and in scores of other writers down 
to and beyond Cyrano de Bergerac. The idea, indeed, of combining 
the interest and novelty of foreign travel with an obvious satire on 
" travellers' tales," and a somewhat less obvious one on the follies, 
vices, and contrasted foibles of mankind, is not beyond the range of 
an extremely moderate intellect, and could never be regarded as the 
property or copyright even of the greatest. It is the astonishing vigour 
and variety of Swift's dealing with this public stuff that craves notice ; 
and twenty times the space here available would be too little to do 
justice to that. The versatility with which the picture — it can 
hardly even at its worst be called the caricature — ^of mankind is 
adjusted to the different meridians of the little people, the giants, the 
pedants, the unhappy immortals, and the horses — the dexterous relief 
of the satirist's lash with the mere tickling of the humourist — the 
wonderful prodigality of power and the more wonderful economy of 
words and mere decorations — all these things deserve the most care- 
ful study, and the most careful study will not in the least interfere 
with, but will only enhance, the perpetual enjoyment of them. 

It only remains to point out very briefly the suitableness of the 



CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 533 

style to the work. Swift's style is extremely unadorned, though the 
unfailing spirit of irony prevents it from being, except to the most 
poor and unhappy tastes, in the very least degree flat. Though not 
free from grammatical licenses, it is on the whole correct enough, and 
is perfectly straightforward and clear. There may be a very differ- 
ent meaning lurking by way of innuendo behind Swift's literal and 
grammatical sense, but that sense itself can never be mistaken. 
Further, he has — unless he deliberately assumes them as the costume 
of a part he is playing — absolutely no distinguishing tricks or 
manners, no catchwords, and in especial no unusual phrases or 
vocables either imitated or invented. In objecting to neologisms, as 
he did very strongly, he was perhaps critically in the wrong ; for a 
language which ceases to grow dies. But, like some, though by no 
means all, similar objectors, he has justified his theory by his practice. 
In fact, if intellectual genius and literary art be taken together, no 
prose-writer, who is a prose-writer mainly, is Swift's superior, and a 
man might be hard put to it to say who among such writers in 
the plainer English can be pronounced his equal. 

It has been said that it is hard to settle the credit of the invention 
of the Queen Anne Essay, in which the characteristic of the later 
Augustan period was chiefly shown. For years before it appeared, 
the essay-Avriters, from Bacon to Temple on the one 
hand, and the journalists, of whom the most remarkable Essaytsts 
were mentioned at the close of the last chapter, on the 
other, had been bearing down nearer and nearer to this particular point. 
The actual starting is usually assigned to the Review of a greater 
than any of these journalists, Daniel Defoe, who will, however, find 
a more suitable place later in this chapter. And it is noteworthy 
that Swift, whose fertility in ideas was not less remarkable than the 
nonchalance with which he abandoned them or suggested them to 
his friends, was most intimate with Steele and Addison just at the 
time of the appearance of the Tatler, lent it a nom de guerre, wrote 
for it, and may in different metaphors be said to have given it 
inspiration, atmosphere, motive power, launch. But it was un- 
doubtedly set agoing under the management of another person, 
Steele, and he need not be deprived of the honour. 

Richard Steele was born in Dublin in March 1672, but he had 
little to do with Ireland afterwards. His school was the Charter- 
house, and from it he went to Merton College at Oxford, where he 
was postmaster. But though he made some stay at the 
University he took no degree, and left it for the army, 
beginning as a cadet or gentleman volunteer in the second Life 
Guards, whence he passed as an ensign to the Coldstreams and as 
a captain to Lucas's foot. He became Gazetteer in 1707, and a 



534 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

little later engaged, with more zeal than discretion, in Whig politics, 
being expelled from the House of Commons in the turbulent last 
years of Anne. The success of the Hanoverians restored him to 
fortune, or the chance of it, and he was knighted and made patentee 
of Drury Lane. But he was always a spendthrift and a speculator, 
and in his later years he had to retire to an estate which his second 
wife (an heiress in Wales as the first had been in the West Indies) 
had brought him near Caermarthen. He died there in 1729. His 
letters and even his regular works tell us a great deal about his 
personality, which, especially as contrasted with that of Addison, has 
occasioned much writing. 

Steele's desertion of the University for the army might not seem 
to argue a devotion to the Muses. But he began ^ while still a 
soldier by a book of devotion, The Christian Hero (1701), and it 
was not in him, whatever it might have been in another, at all 
inconsistent to turn to play-writing, in which occupation he observed, 
though not excessively, the warnings of Jeremy Collier. The Taller 
(1709) opened his true vein, and in it, in the Spectator, in the 
Gitardian, in the Englishman, Lover, and other periodicals, he 
displayed a faculty for miscellany more engaging, though much 
less accomplished, than Addison's own. In the political articles of 
this series, and still in ore in his political pamphlets, he is at his 
worst, for he had no argumentative faculty, and was utterly at tlie 
mercy of such an opponent as Swift. The Conscious Lovers, his most 
famous play, was late (1722), and is distinguished, amid the poor 
plays between Farquhar and Sheridan, for its mixture of briskness 
and amiability. There was a third ingredient, sentimentality, which 
is indeed sufficiently prominent in Steele's earlier comedies. The 
Funeral (1701), The Lying Lover (1703), and The Tender Husband 
(1705), and by no means absent from his essays. But, with a little 
allowance, it adds to these latter a charm which, though it may be 
less perceptible to later generations than it was to those who had 
sickened of the ineffable brutality of the time immediately preceding, 
can still be felt. 

Of the plays, though all endeavour to carry out Collier's prin- 
ciples, The Conscious Lovers is the only one which deserves Fielding's 
raillery, through Parson Adams, as to its being '' as good as a sermon," 
which Hazlitt has rather unfiiiily extended to all. Even The Con- 

1 No complete edition. The Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian essays are in 
the usual British Essayists; the others must be sought in original editions, or 
ed. Nichols, 4 vols. 1791. There is an excellent selection from the former set 
(Oxford, 1885) and an admirable monograph (London, 1886) by Mr. Austin 
Dobson. The plays are in the "Mermaid Series" (London, 1894), edited by 
Mr. Aitken, who has also written a long Life of Steele (2 vols. London, 1889). 



CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 535 

scions LoTJcrs contains, in tlie scenes between Tom and Phillis, 
pictures of flirtation belowstairs which, with all Steele's tenderness 
and good feeling, have nearly as much vivacity as any 
between the most brazen varlets and baggages of the 
Restoration dramatists. The Lying Lover, an adaptation of 
Le Mentciir, is of no great merit, perhaps because it also has a 
slight tendency to sermonising. But The Funeral, though very 
unnatural in plot and decidedly unequal in character, contains a 
famous passage of farcical comedy between an undertaker and his 
mates, and a good though rascally lawyer. The most uniformly 
amusing of the four is The Tender Husband, though the ap- 
propriateness of the title is a little open to question. The pair of 
innocents, the romantic heiress Biddy Tipkin and the clumsy heir 
Humphry Gubbin, are really diverting, and in the first case to no 
small extent original ; while they have furnished hints to no less 
successors than Fielding, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and Miss Austen. 
The lawyer and the galla,nt are also distinctly good, and the aunt has 
again furnished hints for Mrs. Malaprop, as Biddy has for Lydia. 
Steele, who always confessed, and probably as a rule exaggerated, his 
debts to Addison, acknowledges them here ; and there is a certain 
Addisonian tone about some of the humours, though Steele was quite 
able to have supplied them. Fond as he was of the theatre, how- 
ever, and familiar with it, he had little notion of constructing a 
play, and his morals constantly tripped up his art. The essay, not 
the drama, was his real field. 

The almost inextricable entanglement of the work of Steele with 
Addison's, and the close connection of the two in life, have always 
occasioned a sort of comparison, now to the advantage of the one, 
now to that of the other, in literary history ; and there is probably 
more loss than gain in the endeavour to separate them sternly. We 
may therefore best give Addison's life, and such short sketch of his 
books as is possible now, and then consider together the work, still in 
. parts not very clearly attributable to one more than to the other, 
which gives them, and must always give them, an exalted place in 
English literature. 

Joseph Addison 1 was born, like Steele, in 1672, but in May 
instead of in March. His father, Lancelot Addison, was a divine of 
parts and position, who became Dean of Lichfield. His mother's name 
was Jane Gulston. After experience of some country schools, at 
one of which he is said to have shared in a " barring-out," he, like 

1 Many editions of complete Works (tlie best by Hurd), which are still worth 
getting for the miscellanies. Poems in Chalmers. Essays (most) in British 
Essayists : Selected Essays by J. R. Green (London, 1880) and T. Arnold (Oxford, 
1886). 



536 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

Steele, went to the Charterhouse and then to Oxford, where he was 
first at Queen's, then at Magdalen, holding a demyship, taking his 
Master's degree in 1693, and being elected to a Fellow- 
llfe!"^ ship in 1697, at the latter college, where "Addison's 
Walk" preserves his name. He made early acquaint- 
ance with Dryden, but adopted Whig politics ; and, by the influence 
of Montague, obtained in 1699 a travelhng pension of ^300 a year. 
He discharged the obligation loyally, remaining four years abroad, 
visiting most parts of the Continent, and preparing, if not finishing, 
his only prose works of bulk, the Remarks on Italy (1704) and the 
Dialogues on Medals, not published till later. But when he came 
back in 1703, Halifax was out of favour, his pension was stopped, 
and, having broken off his University career by his failure to take 
orders, he was for some time in doubtful prospects. But his poem 
of The Campaign, in which he celebrated Blenheim (1704), with one 
fine passage and a good deal of platitude, gained high reputation in 
the dearth of poetical accomplishment, and the short summer of 
favour for men of letters, which followed Dryden's death ; and he was 
made a Commissioner of Excise. 

This was the first of a long series of appointments, official and 
diplomatic, which was not, thanks to Swift, entirely interrupted even 
during the Tory triumph, and which enabled Addison, who had 
been in 1703 nearly penniless, to layout, in 171 1, ;^io,ooo on an 
estate in Warwickshire. It culminated in 1717, after the Hanoverian 
triumph, by his being appointed Secretary of State, which office he 
held but a short time, resigning it for a large pension. He had a 
year before married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, and he died 
of dropsy at Holland House in 1719, aged only forty-seven. His 
character has been discussed, not with acrimony, for no one can 
dislike Addison, but with some heat. He had none of the numerous 
foibles of which Steele was guilty, except a rather too great devotion 
to wine. But the famous and magnificent "Character of Atticiis," 
by Pope, is generally supposed by all but partisans to be at best a 
poisoned dart, which hit true. His correct morality — the Bohemian 
philosopher Mandeville called him "a parson in a tie-wig" — has 
been set down to cold-bloodedness, and there has even been notice- 
able dissension about the relative amount of literary genius in him 
and in Steele. 

As noticed already, Addison's literary work outside periodicals is 

by no means small. His early Latin poems are very clever, and very 

happy in their artificial way. Of his English verse nothing 

laiieoi^l^'work. ^^^^ Survived, except his really beautiful hymns, where 

the combination of sincere religious feelings (of the 

sincerity of Addison's religion there is absolutely no doubt, though 



CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE "^ 537 

it was of a kind now out of fasliion) and of critical restraint produced 
things of real, though modest and quiet, excellence. ''The Lord my 
pasture shall prepare," " The spacious firmament on high," and 
" How are Thy servants blest ! O Lord," may lack the mystical 
inspiration of the greatest hymns, but their cheerful piety, their 
graceful use of images, which, though common, are never mean, their 
linish and even, for the time, their fervour make them singularly 
pleasant. The man who wrote them may have had foibles and 
shortcomings, but he can have had no very grave faults, as the 
authors of more hysterical and glowing compositions easily might. 

The two principal prose works are little -read now, but they are 
worth reading. They show respectable learning (with limitations 
admitted by such a well-qualified and well-affected critic as Macaulay), 
they are excellent examples (though not so excellent as the Essays) 
of Addison's justly famous prose, and they exhibit, in the opening of 
the Medals and in all the descriptive passages of the Italy, the 
curious insensibility of the time to natural beauty, or else its almost 
more curious inability to express what it felt, save in the merest 
generalities and commonplaces. 

The three plays at least indicate Addison's possession, though in 
a much less degree, of his master Dryden's general faculty of literary 
craftsmanship. The opera of Rosamdjid is, indeed, clearly modelled 
on Dryden in its serious parts, but is no great success there. The 
lighter and more whimsical quality of Addison's humour enabled him 
to do better in the farcical passages, which, especially the speeches 
of Sir Trusty, sometimes have a singularly modern and almost 
Gilbertian quality about them. The comedy of The Dnanjner, where 
a Wiltshire tradition is used to make a play on a theme not entirely 
different from Steele's Funeral (in each a husband is thought to be 
dead when he is not), contains, like Steele's own pieces, some smart 
'■ words," but no very good dramatic situation or handling. It is, 
also like Steele's, an attempt to write Restoration drama in the fear 
of Jeremy Collier. Cafo, the most famous, is at this time of day by 
far the least interesting. Its universally known stock-pieces give 
almost all that it has of merit in versification and style ; as a drama 
it has an uninteresting plot, wooden characters, and a great absence 
of life and idiosyncrasy. 

It is very diiTerent when we turn to the Essays. The so-called 
Essay which Steele launched in the Taller, which was taken up and 
perfected in the Spectator, which had numerous immediate followers, 
and a succession of the greatest importance at intervals jjj^ ^^ 
throughout the century, and which at once expressed and Steele's 
influenced the tone and thought of that century after a '^^^^^' 
fashion rarely paralleled, was not originally started in quite the form 



538 THE AUGUSTAN AGES 



which it soon assumed, and never, for the greater part of a hundred 
years, wholly lost. Naturally enough, Steele at first endeavoured to 
make it a newspaper, as well as a miscellany and review. But by 
degrees, and before very long, news was dropped, and comment, in the 
form of special essays, of " letters to the editor," sometimes real, oftener 
manufactured, of tales and articles of all the various kinds which 
have subsisted with no such great change till the present day, reigned 
alone. As Addison's hand prevailed — though literature, religion, and 
even politics now and then, the theatre very often, and other things 
were not neglected — the main feature of the two papers, and espe- 
cially of the Spectator, became a kind of light but distinctly firm censor- 
ship of manners, especially the part of them nearest to morals, and 
of morals, especially the part of them nearest to manners. Steele, 
always zealous and always generous, but a little wanting in criticism, 
not infrequently diverged into sentimentality. Addison's tendency, 
though he, too, was "unflinchingly on virtue's side, was rather towards 
a very mellow and not unindulgent but still distinctly cynical 
cynicism — a smile too demure ever to be a grin, but sometimes, 
except on religious subjects, faintly and distantly approaching a 
sneer. This appears even in the most elaborate and kindly of the 
imaginative creations of the double series, Sir Roger de Coverley, whom 
Steele indeed seems to have invented, but whom Addison adopted, 
perfected, and (some, perhaps without reason, say) even killed out 
of kindness, lest a less delicate touch should take the bloom oft" him. 
This great creation, which comes nearer than anything out of prose 
fiction or drama to the masterpieces of the novelists and dramatists, is 
accompanied by others hardly less masterly ; while Addison con- 
stantly, and Steele not seldom, has sketches or touches as perfect in 
their way, though less elaborate. It is scarcely too much to say that 
these papers, and especially the Spectator, taught the eighteenth 
century how it should, and especially how it should not, behave in 
public places, from churches to theatres ; what books it should like, 
and how it shoul^. like them ; how it should treat its lovers, mistresses, 
husbaods, wives, patents, and friends ; that it might politely sneer at 
operas, and must not take any art except literature too seriously ; that 
a moderate and refined devotion to the Protestant religion and the 
Hanoverian succession was' the duty, though not the whole duty, of 
a gentleman. It is still a little astonishing to find with what docility 
the century obeyed and learnt its lesson. Addison died a little 
before, Steele not much after, its first quarter closed ; yet in the 
lighter work of sixty or seventy years later we shall find, with the 
slightest differences of external fashion, the laws of the Spectator 
held still by " the town " with hardly a murmur, by the country with- 
out the slightest hesitation. In particular, these papers taught the 



CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 539 

century how to write ; and the lesson was accepted on this point 
with almost more unhesitating obedience than on any other. The 
magnificent eulogy of Johnson,^- who had himself deviated not a 
little, though perhaps unconsciously, from Addisonian practice, would 
have been disputed by hardly any one who reached manhood in Eng- 
land between the Peace of Utrecht and the French Revolution ; and, 
abating its exclusiveness a little, it remains true still. 

Steele, though he has some rarer flights than his friend, is much 
less correct, and much less polished ; while, though he had started 
with equal chances, his rambling life had stored him Avith far less 
learning than Addison possessed. The latter, while he never 
reached the massive strength and fiery force of Swift, did even more 
than Swift himself to lift English prose out of the rut, or rather 
quagmire, of colloquialism and slovenliness in which, as we have 
seen, it was sinking. He could even, though he rarely did, rise to a 
certain solemnity — cavight, it may be, from Temple, who must have 
had much influence on him. But, like Temple's, though with a 
more modern, as well as a more varied and completely polished, 
touch, his style was chiefly devoted to the " middle " subjects and 
manners. He very rarely attempts sheer whimsical fooling. But he 
can treat all the subjects that come within the purview and interests 
of a well-bred man of this world, who by no means forgets the next, 
in a style quite inimitable in its golden mediocrity — well-informed, 
without being in the least pedantic ; moral, without direct preaching 
(unless he gives forewarning) ; slightly superior, but with no provoking 
condescension in it; polite, without being frivolous or finicking; neat, 
but not overdressed ; easy, but, as Johnson justly states, never familiar 
in any oifensive degree. It is easier to feel enthusiasm about Steele, 
who had so much,- than about Addison, who at any rate shows so 
little ; and on the character, the genius, the originality, of the two 
there may always be room for dispute. But it seems incredible that 
any one should deny to Addison the credit of being by far the greater 
artist, and of having brought his own rather special, rather limited, 
but peculiar and admirable division of art to a perfection seldom else- 
where attained in letters. 

These three greatest writers were surrounded by others hardly 
less than great. Arbuthnot, Atterbury, Bentley, Bolingbroke, 
Mandeville, the younger Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Butler, Middleton, 
were all either actual contributors to the great periodical series, or 
intimately connected with those who wrote these, or (which is of equal 

1 " Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar, but not coarse, and 
elegant, but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of 
Addison." But this is only the crowning sentence of the peroration, throughout 
laudatory, of the Life. 



540 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

importance to us) at any rate exponents of the extremely plain prose 
style, which required the exquisite concinnity of Addison, the volcanic 
and Titanic force and fire of Swift, or the more than Attic stateliness 
and grace of Berkeley, to save it from being too plain. The order 
in which they are to be mentioned is unimportant, and few can 
have more than very brief space, but none must pass unnoticed. 

Richard Bentley, a very great classical scholar, and no mean 
writer of English, was a Yorkshireman, born in 1662, and educated 
at Wakefield. He went early to St. John's College, Cambridge, was 
taken as a private tutor into the household of Stilling- 
fleet, took orders not very early, was made King's 
Librarian in 1694, engaged, and was completely victorious, in the 
Ancient and Modern controversy, especially in reference to the 
Epistles of PJialaris ; was made Master of Trinity in 1699, and passed 
nearly the whole of his more than forty years of mastership, till his 
death in 1742, in a desperate struggle with his college, wherein, if 
his adversaries were unscrupulous, he was no less so, while the right 
was on the whole rather against him, though his bull-dog tenacity has 
won over most commentators on the matter to his side. There is at 
any rate no doubt of his learning, his logical power, and his very real, 
tliough gruft" and horseplayful, humour. To merely English literature 
he stands 1 in two very different relations. His almost incredibly 
absurd emendations on Milton would, if the thing were not totally 
alien from the spirit of the man, seem like a designed parody on 
classical scholarship itself. But his writing, especially in the famous 
Fhalaris dissertation, and in the remarks on the Deist Collins, is 
extraordinarily vigorous and vivid. His birth-date, probably even 
more than a design to avoid the reproach of pedantry, made him 
colloquial, homely, and familiar down to the very level from which 
Swift and Addison tried to lift, and to a great extent succeeded in 
lifting, prose ; but his native force and his wide learning save him, 
though sometimes with difficulty, from the merely vulgar. 

Conyers Middleton,- Bentley's most deadly enemy, was, like 

Bentley, a Yorkshireman, but was much younger, having been born at 

Richmond in 1683. He went to Trinity young, and was not only a 

»,jj, Fellow thereof, but connected throughout his life with 

Middleton. ^,., ,,. ri % rrr- 

Cambridge, by his tenure of the offices of University 
Librarian from 1722 onwards, and Woodwardian Professor of Geology 
for a time. He was a man of property, was thrice married, and held 
several livings till his death in 1750, though his orthodoxy was, in his 
own times and afterwards, seriously impugned. 

This does not concern us here, though it may be observed that 

1 Works in various editions. The Phalaris dissertation often separately. 

2 Miscellaneous Works, 5 vols. 1753. Tlie Cicero has been often reprinted. 



CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 541 

Middleton may be cleared from anything but a rather advanced 
stage of the latitudinarianism and dislike of " enthusiasm " which was 
generally felt by the men of his time, and which invited — indeed 
necessitated — the Evangelical and Methodist revolt. So, too, we 
need not busy ourselves much with the question whether he directly 
plagiarised, or only rather freely borrowed from the Scotch Latinist, 
Bellenden, in his longest and most famous prose work, the Life 
of Cicero (1741). Besides this, he wrote two controversial works 
of length — ostensibly directed against Popery, certainly against 
extreme su]3ernaturalism, and, as his enemies will have it, covertly 
against Christianity — entitled A Letter frotn Rovie, showing an exact 
Conformity betivcen Popery a7id Pagatiism {iizi)), and A Free 
Inqtnry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have 
existed in the Christian Church (1748) ; with a large number of small 
pamphlets on a variety of subjects, in treating which he showed wide 
culture and intelligence. His place here, however, is that of the 
most distinguished representative of the absolutely plain style — not 
colloquial and vernacular like Bentley's, but on the other hand 
attempting none of the graces which Addison and Berkeley in their 
different ways achieved — a style more like the plainer Latin or French 
styles than like anything else in English. 

John Arbuthnot,^ the "moon" of Swift, born 1667, came of the 
noble family of that name in Kincardineshire, but went to Oxford, 
and spent all the later part of his life in London, where he was 
physician to Queen Anne, a strong Tory, and an intimate 
friend of Swift and Pope. He died in 1735, much 
respected and beloved. Arbuthnot's literary fate, or rather the 
position which he deliberately chose, was peculiar. It is very 
difficult to identify much of his work, and what seems certainly his 
(especially the famous History of fohn Bull and The Memoirs of 
Scriblerus) is exceedingly like Swift, and was pretty certainly pro- 
duced in concert with that strange genius, who, unlike some animals, 
never took colour from his surroundings, but always gave them his 
own. It is, however, high enough praise that Arbuthnot, at the best 
of his variable work, is not inferior to anything but the very best of 
Swift. There is the same fertility and the same unerringness of 
irony ; and, if we can distinguish, it is only that a half or wholly 
good-natured amusement takes the place of Swift's indignation. 

Francis Atterbury,''^ born in Buckinghamshire in 1672, a dis- 
tinguished Christ Church man, who, after being head of his house, 
obtained the Bishopric of Rochester and the Deanery of Westminster 
ii succession to Sprat, was the divine and scholar of the extreme 

1 Ed. Aitken, 1S92. 

2 No coniolete i;r modern edition. 



542 



THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 



Tory party, as Arbuthnot was their man of science. He has been 
accused not merely of conspiring after the Hanoverian succession, 
but of denying it, and sailing too near perjury in his 
^"^ "'^^' denial. Of this there is no sufficient proof, and we must 
remember that the political ethics of the age were extremely accom- 
modating. He was at any rate attainted, and banished (in 1723) to 
France, where he died nine years later. A brilliant and popular 
preacher, a pleasant letter-writer, a most dangerous controversialist 
and debater, and a good critic (though he made the usual mistakes 
of his age about poetry before Waller), Atterbury wrote in a style not 
very unlike Addison's, though inferior to it. 

The huge contemporary fame of Henry St. John. Viscount 
Bolingbroke,^ and its rapid and lasting decline after his death, are 
among the commonplaces of literary history. He was born in 
1678, passed through Eton and Christ Church, entered 
o mg ro e. pjjj.jj^j-f-jgj^j. ygj-y early, was Secretary for War at six-and- 
twenty, climbed with Harley to power, and contrived to edge his 
companion " out," but remained " in " himself only a few days, fled to 
the Continent, returned to England and recovered his estates, but 
not his seat in Parliament, in 1723, organised and carried on the 
English Fronde against Walpole, and died in 1751. His career — 
for he was as famous for " wildness " as for success — was of those 
which specially appeal to the vulgar, and are not uninteresting even 
to unvulgar tastes. He was beyond question one of the greatest 
orators of his day, and he was extravagantly praised by his friends, 
who happened to include the chief poet and the greatest prose writer of 
the time. Yet hardly any one who for generations has opened the 
not few volumes of his works has closed them without more or less 
profound disappointment. Bolingbroke, more than any other English 
writer, is a rhetorician pure and simple ; and it was his misfortune, 
first, that the subjects of his rhetoric were not the great and perennial 
subjects, but puny ephemeral forms of them — the partisan and 
personal politics of his day, the singularly shallow form of infidelity 
called Deism, and the like — and, secondly, that his time deprived him 
of many, if not most, of the rhetorician's most telling weapons. The 
Letter to Windhavi (1716), a sort of apologia, and the Ideal of a 
Patriot King (1749) exhibit him at his best. 

Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761), a pluralist courtier, and more 
than doubtfully orthodox divine on the Whig side, held four sees in 
succession, in one at least of wliicli he was the cause of much 
literature, or at least many books, by provoking the famous 
" Bangorian " controversy. He himself wrote clearly and well. Nor 



1 Works, 8 vols. London, 1809. 



CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 543 

can the same praise be denied to Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) 
pliilosopher, physicist, and divine. There is more diversity of 
opinion about the purely literary merits, as distinguished 
from the unquestioned claims in religious philosophy, of other 'divhies 
Bishop Joseph Butler, who was born at Wantage in 
1692, left Nonconformity for the Church, went to Oriel, became 
preacher at the Rolls Chapel, Rector of Stanhope, Bishop of Bristol, 
Dean of St. Paul's, and, lastly, Bishop of Durham, owing thes« 
appointments to no cringing or intrigue, but to his own great 
learning, piety, wisdom, and churchmanship, fortunately backed by 
Queen Caroline's fancy for philosophy. Butler's Sermons, published 
in 1726, and his Analogy of Auxinral and Revealed Religion ten 
years later, occasionally contain aphorisms of beauty equal to their 
depth ; but it is too much to claim " crispness and clearness " for 
his general style,^ which is, on the contrary, too often obscure and 
tough. 

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, the third of his 
names and title, the grandson of " Achitophel," and the son of the 
''shapeless lump" (a phrase for which he never forgave Dryden), was 
born in 1671. His mother was Lady Dorothy Manners. 
He was brought up partly by a learned lady, and partly s u y. 

by Locke. He was for three years at Winchester, went to no 
University, and travelled a good deal abroad. He sat for a short 
time in the House of Commons, but made no figure there or in the 
House of Lords, where, during nearly the whole time of his tenure of 
the earldom (1699-17 13), politics, whether Whig or Tory, were of too 
rough a cast for his dilettantism. He died, after more foreign travel, in 
1713. His writings, scattered and not extensive, had been collected 
two years before as Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.'^ 
Shaftesbury was an original and almost powerful thinker and writer, 
spoilt by an irregular education, a sort of morbid aversion from 
English thought generally, an early attack of Deism, and a strong 
touch of affectation. Much harm has been done to him by Lamb's 
description of his style as " genteel," a word in Lamb's time and 
later not connoting the snobbishness which has for half a century 
been associated with it. " Superfine," the usual epithet, is truer ; 
though Dr. George Campbell, an excellent critic, was somewhat too 
severe ^ on Shaftesbury's Gallicisms, and his imprudent and rather 
amateurish engagement in the Deist controversy of the time caused 

1 Butler's Scrmoi/s and Analogy, which have long played an important part 
as text-books in the Oxford curriculum, have been well cared for in matter of 
reprints by that University. Clarke and Hoadly must be sought, if at all. in con- 
temporary editions. 

2 New ed. 3 vols. London, 1749. 3 in his Philosophy of Rhetoric. 



544 THE AUGUSTAN AGES 



him to be broken a little too ruthlessly on the wheel, adamantine 
in polish as in strength, of Berkeley in AlcipJiroH. His central 
doctrine, that ridicule is the test of truth, as well as his style, are in 
reality caricatures of Addison, though the dates preclude any notion 
of plagiarism. He is full of suggestion, and might have been a great 
thinker and writer. 

Shaftesbury's superfineness and his optimism seem to have had 

at least a considerable share in provoking the cynical pessimism of 

another remarkable thinker of this time, Bernard Mandeville, or de 

Mandeville,! a Dutchman, born at Dordrecht about 1670, 

Mandeville 

who came early to London, attained a singular mastery 
of English, practised physic, and died in 1733. There is some 
mystery, and probably some mystification, about the origin of The 
GrHiiibling Hive, better known by its later title of The Fable of the 
Bees. No edition earlier than 1705 is known, but Mandeville claimed 
a much earlier date for it. About nine years later a reprint, in 1714, 
drew attention, and after yet another nine years another was " pre- 
sented " by the Grand Jury of Middlesex, and fiercely denounced by 
men of such importance as Law and Berkeley. The book, which was 
constantly enlarged, is in its final form a cluster of prose tractates, 
with a verse nucleus (the original piece) showing how vice made 
some bees happy, and virtue made them miserable. A good deal 
of other work, some certainly and some probably spurious, is attributed 
to Mandeville, who is the Diogenes of English philosophy. An 
exceedingly charitable judgment may impute to deliberate paradox, 
and to irritation at Shaftesbury's airy gentility, his doctrine that 
private vices are public benefits ; but the gusto with which he 
caricatures and debases everything pure and noble and of good 
report is, unluckily, too genuine. He thought, however, with great 
force and acuteness, despite his moral twist ; he had a strong, 
fertile, and whimsical humour ; and his style, plebeian as it is, may 
challenge comparison with the most famous literary vernaculars 
in English for racy individuality. 

If, however, Shaftesbury has rather too much of the peacock, 
and Mandeville a great deal too much of the polecat, about him, no 
depreciatory animal comparison need be sought or feared for George 
Berkeley, the best-praised man of his time, and among 
the most deserving of praise. He was born in 1685 
near Kilkenny, and was educated first, like Swift and Congreve 
earlier, at its famous grammar school, and then at Trinity College, 
Dul)lin, where he ma4e a long residence, and wrote his chief purely 

1 Works never collected — some rare and some doubtful. The Fable of the Bees 
is common. I use the so-called ninth (Edinburgh, 1755) edition of its fullest 
form. 



CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 545 

philosophical works. In 1713 he went to London, and was intro- 
duced to the wits by Swift, after which he travelled on the Continent 
for several years. He was made Dean of Derry in 1724, went with 
missionary schemes, which were defeated, to North America, but 
returned, in 1731, and published the admirable dialogues oi Alciphron. 
He was made Bishop of Cloyne in 1734, and for eighteen years 
resided in his diocese. A few months before his death, in 1753, he 
had gone, in bad health, to Oxford, and he died there. 

Berkeley's principal works,i or groups of works, are first — The 
Theory of Vision (1709), The Principles of Hitman Knowledge (1710), 
and the Dialogues of Hylas [Materialist] and Thilonous [partisan of 
mind], in which, continuing the Lockian process of argimient against 
innate ideas, he practically re-establi^.ied them by a further process of 
destruction, and brought down on himself a great deal of very igno- 
rant attack or banter for his supposed denial of matter. The above- 
mentioned Alciphron ; or, the Minnie Philosopher, is a series of 
dialogues, in which the popular infidelity of the day, whether optimist 
like Shaftesbury's, pessimistical like Mandeville's, or one-sidedly 
critical like that of the Deists proper, is attacked in a fashion which 
those who sympathise with the victims accuse of occasional unfair- 
ness, but which has extraordinary cogency as polemic, and extraor- 
dinary brilliance as literature. His last important book was Siris, 
an odd miscellany, advocating tar-water for the body, and administer- 
ing much excellent mysticism to the soul ; but he wrote some minor 
things, and a good many letters, diaries, etc., which were not fully 
published till the later years of the present century. 

Unusually good as a man, and unusually great as a philosopher, 
Berkeley would have stood in the first rank as a mere writer had his 
character been bad or unknown, and the matter of his writings un- 
important. The charm of his style is at once so subtle 
and so pervading that it is extremely difficult to separate "his sly". ° 
and define it. He has no mannerisms ; although he is 
a most accomplished ironist, he does not depend upon irony for the 
seasoning of his style, as, in different ways, do Addison and Swift ; he 
can give the plainest and most unadorned exposition of an abstruse, 
philosophical doctrine with perfect literary grace. And (as, for 
instance, in Lysicles' version of Mandeville's vices-and-benefits 
argument) he can saturate a long passage with satiric innuendo, 
never once breaking out into direct tirade or direct burlesque. He 
can illustrate admirably, but he is never the dupe of his illustrations. 
He is clearer even than Hobbes and infinitely more elegant, while 

1 Editions are numerous, but for critical purposes, and also as containing some 
previously unpublished matter. Professor Campbell Fraser'c (4 vols. Oxford, 1871) 
is the standard. 



546 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

his dialect and arrangement, though originally arrived at for 
argumentative purposes, or at least in argumentative works, are 
equally suited for narrative, for dialogue, for description, for almost 
every literary end. Were it not for the intangibleness, and there- 
fore the inimitableness, of his style, he would be an even better 
general model than Addison ; and, as it is, he is unquestionably 
the best model in English, if not in any language, for philosophical, 
and indeed for argumentative, writing generally. 

Daniel Defoe,^ the link between the great essayists of the earlier 
and the great novelists of the middle years of the eighteenth century 
— one of the most voluminous and problematical of English writers, 
as well as one of all but the greatest — a man, too, of 
very questionable life and character — could not be fully 
discussed in any compendious history of English literature. But 
luckily it is by no means necessary that he should be so discussed, 
the strictly literary lines of his work being broad and clear, and the 
problems both of it and of his life being such as may, without any 
loss, be left to the specialist. He was born, it would seem, in 1659 
(not, as used to be thotrght, 1661) in the heart of London, St. Giles's, 
Cripplegate, where his father (whose name was certainly Foe) was a 
butcher. It is not known for what reason or cause Daniel, when more 
than fifty, assumed the " de," sometimes as separate particle, some- 
times in composition. He was well educated, but instead of becom- 
ing a Nonconformist minister, took to trade, which at intervals and 
in various forms (stocking-selling, tile-making, etc.) he pursued with 
no great luck. He seems to have been a partaker in Monmouth's 
rebellion, and was certainly a good deal abroad in the later years of 
the seventeenth century, but he early took to the vocation of pam- 
phleteering, which, with journalism and novel-writing, gave his three 
great literary courses. The chief among many results of this was 
the famous Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), a statement of 
the views of the extreme "Highflying" or High Church party, in 
which some have seen irony, but which really is the exact analogue 
in argument of his future fictions, that is to say, an imitation of what 
he wanted to represent so close that it looks exactly like fact. He 
was prosecuted, fined, pilloried, and imprisoned, but, in the growing 
Whig temper of the nation, the piece was undoubtedly very effective. 

1 'I'liere is no complete collection, and hardly the possibility of any, of Defoe's 
enormous work. Partial collections, and lives, are rather numerous. The most 
recent of the former is Mr. Aitken's (of the novels), the most accessible of the gen- 
eral works that in Bohn's Library (7 vols.), the best Hazlitt's (3 vols. London, 
1841). Mr. Lee's speculative but laborious Life and Unpiiblislud [['/itinj^s (3 
vols. London, 1869) is necessary for all thorough students; Professor Morley's 
selection of the miscellaneous works (not fiction) in the " Carisbrooke Library " 
is very cheap and useful. 



CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 547 

For the greater part of the reign of Queen Anne, and at first 
in prison, Defoe carried on, from 1704 to 17 13, his famous Revieiv, 
the prototype to some extent of the great later periodicals, but written 
entirely by himself Before he had been long in prison he was 
liberated by Harley, of whose statesmanship, shifty in method, and 
strangely compounded of Toryism and Whiggery in principle, Defoe 
became a zealous secret agent. He had a great deal to do with 
negotiating the Union with Scotland. Nor did Harley's fall put an 
end to his engagement in subterranean branches of the public service ; 
for it has long been known that under the House of Hanover he dis- 
charged the delicate, or indelicate, part of a Tory journalist, secretly 
paid by the Whig Government to tone down and take the sling out 
of Misfs Journal and other Opposition papers. He lived for a good 
many years longer, and did his very best literary work in his latest 
period ; but at the last he experienced some unexplained revolution 
of fortune, and died at Moorfields, in concealment and distress, in 
1731- 

Of Defoe's, in the strictest sense, innumerable works the follow- 
ing catalogue of the most important ma\' serj-e : — Essay on Projects 
(1698), an instance of the restless tendency of the time towards com- 
mercial and social improvements, and of Defoe's own fertility ; The 
True-Born Englishman (1701), an argument in vigorous though 
most unpoetical verse to clear William from the disability of his 
foreign origin; the Hymn to the P/llory (1703), composed on the 
occasion of his exhibition in that implement, still more vigorous and 
a little less unpoetical ; the curious political satire of the Consolidator 
(1705) ; the masterly Relation of Mrs. Veal, the first instance of his 
wonderful "lies like truth "; ///r^ Divino (1706), worse verse and 
also worse sense than The True-Borfi Englishman. But the best of 
these is poor compared with the great group of fiction of his later 
years — Robinson Cmsoe (1719), Duncan Campbell, Memoirs of a 
Cavalier, axid Captain Singleton (all produced in 1720), Moll Flanders, 
the History of the Plague, and Colonel Jack (all in 1722), Roxana 
(1724), and A New Voyage Round the World (1725). Besides 
these, he published in his later years, as he had in his earlier, a crowd 
of works, small and great, political, topographical, historical, moral, 
and miscellaneous. 

It is not of much use to disct;ss Defoe's moral character, and it 
is sincerely to be hoped that no more revelations concerning it will 
turn up, inasmuch as each is more damaging than the last, except to 
those who have succeeded in taking his true measure once for all. 
It is that of a man who, with no high, fine, or poetical sentiment to 
save him, shared to the full the partisan enthusiasm of his time, and 
its belief that all was fair in politics. His literary idiosyncrasy is 



548 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

more comfortable to handle. He was a man of extraordinary in- 
dustry and versatility, who took an interest, subject to the limitations 
of his tem]Derament, in almost everything, whose brain was wonder- 
fully fertile, and who had a style, if not of the finest or most exquisite, 
singularly well suited to the multifarious duties to which he put it. 
Also, he could give, as hardly even Bunyan had given before him, 
and as nobody has since, absolute verisimilitude to fictitious presenta- 
tions. He seems to have done this mainly by a certain chameleon- 
like faculty of assuming the atmosphere and colour of his subject, and 
by a cunning profusion of exactly suited and selected detail. It is 
enough that in Robinson Crusoe he has produced, by help of this gift, 
a book which is, throughout its first two parts, one of the great books 
of the world in its particular kind ; and that parts of Moll Flanders, 
Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack, at least, are not inferior. Further, 
the "lift" which Defoe gave to the novel was enormous. He was 
still dependent on adventure ; he did not advance much, if at all, 
beyond the more prosaic romantic scheme. But the extraordinary 
verisimilitude of his action could not but show the way to the last step 
that remained to be tak^n, the final projection of character. 



CHAPTER V 

POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 

Divisions of eighteentli-century verse — Pope : his life — His work — His character 

— His poetry — His couplet and paragraph — His phrase — His subjects — 
Garth — Blackmore — Congre ve, etc., — Prior — His metrical importance — Gay 

— Young — Parnell — Lady Winchelsea 

The poetry of the eighteenth century can be classified with a com- 
pleteness and convenience uncommon in literary periods. In the 
first division we see the complete triumph of the " classical " and 
"correct," or conventional, ideal at once exemplified and Divisions of 
achieved in the work of Pope. This is followed by a eighteenth- 

, , .,.,.,,,. , century verse, 

rather longer period, in which the dominant poetry — the 
kind of verse admired and praised by almost all the vulgar and a few 
of the elect — is imitation of Pope, tempered more or less by that of 
Dryden. But side by side with both these (and even at the very 
earliest represented by Lady Winchelsea and one or two others) there 
is a party of mostly unintentional revolt which first, as represented by 
Thomson, reverts to nature in observation, but generalises still in 
expression ; then, as presented by Gray, while not neglecting nature, 
changes all the sources of its literary inspiration, seeking tliem always 
farther back and wider. In respect of form the two first schools are 
almost wholly busied, except in light and occasional verse, with the 
couplet ; while the third, in its endeavour not to be conventional, takes 
refuge in blank verse and stanza-forms. In the present chapter we 
shall have to do with the first, and one or two belated or precocious 
members of the third. The second and the main body of the third 
will occupy us in the next Book. 

Alexander Pope ^ — within certain narrow but impregnable limits 
one of the greatest masters of poetic form that the world has ever 
seen, and a considerable, though sometimes over-rated, satirist — was 

1 The standard library edition of Pope is that of Elvvin and Courthope, with an 
exhaustive Life by the latter, ii vols. London, 1870-89. The "Globe" edition of 
the Poems, by A. W. Ward, is exceptionally valuable. 

549 



550 THE AUGUSTAN AGES 



born in London in 1688, of a respectable tradesman's family. His 
parents were Roman Catholics, and Pope was rather badly educated 
.in his early youth. From the time when his father 
moved to Binfield, on the outskirts of Windsor Forest, 
he seems to have educated himself. The bad health and physical 
deformity which marred his later life, and to which the disagreeable 
parts of his character have been traced, witli a mixture of reason and 
charity, are said not to have been congenital. He wrote verse very 
early ; but his extreme untruthfulness makes it very uncertain how 
much before the date of publication any particular piece was com- 
posed. Still, the dates of the Pastorals (1709), when he was twenty- 
one, of the Essay on Cr itijisni, two years later, and of Windsor 
Forest, two years later still, establish beyond all question his early 
command of versification and expression. Even before the earliest 
of these dates Pope had been introduced to Wycherley and to Walsh, 
and through them he became acquainted with the rising prose lights 
of literature — Addison, Steele, and, above all. Swift. Tliese (at least 
Swift) zealously furthered his scheme of translating the Iliad, which 
was started 1713, began to appear next year, and was finished in 
1720. This, like the Qdyss^y^yN\\\(\\ followed, and a good deal of 
which was done by assistants (Fenton and Broome), was published 
by subscription, and the two brought Pope in not much less than 
;^io,ooo, a sum which, at the rates of interest then prevailing, and with 
some paternal property, was enough to put him in affluence for the 
rest of his life. That life presents little history except a record of 
disease, publications, and quarrels. It was in 1718 that he estab- 
lished himself at Twickenham, which as headquarters he never after- 
wards left, and here he died in 1744. 

The order of his later publications was as follows. The Rape of 
the Lock, j^ublished partially in 1712, reappeared during the time 
of his work on Homer in 1714. He produced an edition of Shakc- 
speare, which could not well be good, in 1728. His 
^ satirical powers, which had already been exhibited in 
fragments, at last took the form of TlieDiinciad (1728-29), a violent 
attack on the minor writers of the day, with wn<3m Pope fancied that 
he had the quarrel of Wit against Dulness, while he really had that of 
an exceedingly irritable poet against reviewers and, in some sense, 
rivals. Thereafter he fell into a course of half-moral, half-satirical 
writings — Epistle to Lord Burlington, Essay on Man, J nutations of 
Horace, Epistle to Arbnthnot, etc. (1730-38), which, whether poetry 
or not, whether j'jhilosophy or not, are at any rate the most brilliant 
examples in English of one particular kind of verse and one particular 
kind of style. His last important work was an alteration and en- 
largement of The DtiHciad (1742-43). Neither changes nor additions 



CHV POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 551 

were by any means always improvements, but the finale of the com- 
plete poem is one of the very greatest things that Pope ever wrote, 
and one of his strongest titles to the name of poet. 

That his claims to that name could be disputed probably never 
entered into the head of any of his contemporaries save his personal 
foes, nor perhaps into the heart and conscience of any even of these. 
They were sufficiently numerous, and Pope amply de- ^,. , 

i^ i J pjig character 

served them. His faults, from their evident connection 
with a sort of childish weakness, invite, and have received, compassion ; 
but to deny them is absurd. Nor were his virtues extremely con- 
spicuous. He is credited with sincere affection for his friends. 
But there were no two men whom he loved and honoured more 
than Swift and Bolingbroke, and yet he could not resist playing 
upon both some of the underhand literary tricks to which he was more 
addicted than any great man of letters except his contemporary and 
analogue Voltaire. He lampooned Addison, who had perhaps given 
him a provocation of which a magnanimous person would have made 
nothing, while it very possibly had no existence except in his own 
morbid fancy ; and though the lampoon, the " Character of Atticus," 
is magnificent literature and not quite unjust, it is all the baser 
ethically for its genius and its justice. He made violent and foolish 
love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and being, or thinking himself, 
snubbed, revenged the snub with vulgar insults which the pen of no 
gentleman could have ever allowed to flow from it at any time, except 
that of the literary bravos of his old friend Wycherley's youth. Even 
his partisans have allowed a feeling of revolt at the venomous and 
snobbish delight with which he dwells at once on the poverty and 
the dinnerlessness of his Grub Street foes. He was stingy in 
entertaining (a very rare fault for his time) ; he had, with no motive to 
save, odd tricks of writing on backs of letters and scraps of paper; 
he had many minor faults. Yet those of his friends with whom he 
did not quarrel never quarrelled with him, and it would be unfair to 
ask whether it was policy or generosity which made him invariably 
favourable to rising young men of letters — Thomson and Johnson 
are the great and sufficient, though by no means the only, examples 
who made their appearance in his time — provided only they did not join 
the real or imagined army of Diabolus in Grub Street. He was a 
very good son; his passion for Martha Blount — a passion which was 
not too well requited, though the object benefited by it most hand- 
somely — seems to have been faithful and intense ; and though trouble- 
some to his inferiors and servants from his infirmities, he seems to 
have been liked by them. 

But his character, save for its close connection with his work, 
matters very little; his literature matters very much. The greater 



552 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

jars of the conflict over the question " Was Pope a poet ? " have 
mostly ceased. Hardly anybody now would dream of denying that 

he was a poet ; very few would assert that he was one 
i!>po ry. ^^ ^j^^ greatest kind. Some indeed have challenged for 
himself the phrase "Return to nature" which has generally been 
applied to the revolters from him. The argument, which lacks 
neither ingenuity or plausibility, is that from the Elizabethan 
time to the Pindaric imitators of Cowley a non-natural exaggeration 
had been a curse, if not the curse, of English poetry, and that Pope 
finally abolished this. Unluckily, however, Cleveland had been dead 
for fifty years when Pope wrote ; Dryden had '' appealed to sense " 
long before he was born ; and the prevalent faults of the time imme- 
diately preceding were not those of unnatural conceit. Even had 
it been otherwise, the nature to which he returned was, in all but 
one re.spect, a nature of prose, not of poetry. He did refine, to the 
utmost possible extent, one special kind of verse, and this — perhaps 
this only — establishes his claim to be a poet. Those who hold that 
though (to their sorrow) there may be verse without poetry, there 
cannot be poetry without verse, are not the least trusty guardians 
of Pope's position. He may be open to attack on other sides; 
here the defence may laugh at any assault. 

Pope's extraordinary mastery of a certain refinement on the 
Drydenian couplet, which, losing not a little strength and colour, and 
something of that portion of the poetic vague which Dryden retained, 

added an incomparable lightness and polish, seems to 
and paragraph. ^"^^^ been attained very early. In the Essay on Criticism 

it is nearly as advanced, if not quite as sure, as in the 
satires of thirty years later. The secret, so far as there is a single 
one, is the bold discarding of everything but the consideration of the 
couplet itself — triplets and Alexandrines, the enjambevtent which even 
Dryden sometimes permitted himself, and the structure of the para- 
graph by any other than sense-methods. This last is, of course, an 
important exception, and it speaks volumes for Pope's skill that he 
can, by means of the sense merely, connect together strings of 
couplets of which, by no means infrequently, each is complete in itself 
in rhythm as in meaning. But he sacrifices every attraction of form 
to the couplet — light, bright, glittering, varied in a manner almost 
impossible to account for, tipped ever with the neatest, smartest, 
sharpest rhyme, and volleying on the dazzled, though at times 
at any rate satiated, reader a sort of salvo of feux-d'' artifice, skip- 
ping, crackling, scattering colour and sound all round and about him. 
If we take a paragraph of Milton's with one of Pope's, and compare 
the apparent variety of the constituent stones of the one building 
with the apparent monotony of those of the other, the difference may 



CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 553 

be at first quite bewildering. One of Dryden's, between the two, will 
partly, though not entirely, solve the difficulty by showing how the law 
of the prose paragraph, that of meaning, is brought to supply the place of 
that of the pure poetic paragraph, the composition of sound and music. 

Pope's other engine for attaining liis effect was phraseology, in 
which he displays the same exquisite, though limited, perfection. 
Here, again, of the remoter and rarer graces of style there are none. 
Pope suggests little ; no conjunction of his words causes 
the "wild surprise" given by the phrase of Chaucer, and 
by those of an unbroken succession from Spenser to Dryden. So also 
(in this point inferior to his friends Addison and Swift) he has little 
humour. But his wit is of the finest, and everything that he wishes 
to say, everything that comes within his purview as proper to be 
said, is expressed with unequalled propriety. It is impossible to 
improve on Pope ; to get something better you must change the 
kind. Nor can there be much doubt that, in the negative as in the 
positive sides of this perfection, he is indebted to that process of 
conscious or unconscious conventionalising which all his time adored 
and which he brought to its acme. The individual and particular 
graces of the literature before and after his century give a nobler 
gust, but it is hit or miss with them. Pope's process — of extracting 
and representing the best thought within his compass in the best 
words that his own genius (still careful of the common) could 
achieve — is lower but surer. He cannot (or can but very rarely when 
transported by private passion, as in the " Character of Atticus," or 
by the contagion of a greater genius, as in that conclusion of The 
Dunciad, which is Swift done into poetry) give the greatest things. 
But what he can give he gives quite unerringly ; he is a secure and 
impeccable master of his own craft. 

With so peculiar a genius as this (for it would be absurd to stint 
Pope to the word " talent," though some logical defence might be made 
for it) his subject could not but be of the greatest importance, while 
even his treatment of matters was necessarily conditioned ^_ 

,-ir-. 1 r "'s subjects. 

by his knowledge. In the subjects 01 the Pastorals, ot 
the Messiah, of IVindso}- Forest,^ he was not really at home, and all 
these are in consequence mere pastiches — things immensely clever but 
no more. In the Essay on Criticism the subject itself was thoroughly 
congenial. Pope knew his own ideal of literature, could express 
that ideal critically as few could, and express it constructively as 
could no other man in the world. But he was a very bad judge of 
other styles and other ideals, and his knowledge of literary as of other 

1 Wordsworth, usually unjust to Pope, lias been too generous to this poem. It 
gives literally nothing of the Forest or of the Thames Valley : a library and a 
poulterer's shop would furnish all its material. 



554 THE AUGUSTAN AGES 



history would have disgraced tlie meanest hack in his own fancied 
Grub Street. Consequently, here and wherever else he touches the 
subject, we get the most ridiculous statements of fact and the most 
absurd arguments based upon them, side by side with maxims and 
judgments worthy of almost any signature in sense, and expressed as 
no one but Pope could express them in form. 

And this difference holds throughout. The Iliad, for instance, a 
wonderful tour deforce of literature, has long become merely a curi- 
osity, because if we want Homer we either go to himself or to a 
translator who has some sense of him. The E/egy on an Unfortunate 
Lady and the Eloisa to Abelard, again, are both marred, though not 
ruined, by the prevalence of conventionalism in reference to subjects 
which, above all others, refuse and defy convention. But the Rape 
of the Lock, artificial as it is, is a perfect triumph of artifice, a piece 
with which no fault can be found except the frequency of the gradus- 
epithet, and in which the gradus-epithet is excused by its suitableness 
to the persons and the manners handled. 

Yet it is in his later Essay, his Epistles, his Satires, his Dunciad, 
that Pope's genius shows at its very greatest. They are no doubt 
mosaics — the " Atticus " passage was pretty certainly written twenty 
years before its insertion in the Epistle to Arbuthnot — but this is 
no defect in them. Their value for meaning varies according 
as Pope was copying optimism from Bolingbroke, pessimism from 
Swift, and a very remarkable kind of orthodoxy from Warburton, or 
was giving expression to his own keen, though, alas! limited, observa- 
tion of society, his personal feelings, and his narrow but clear theory 
of life and literature. Here he reigns triumphant. His philosophy 
may be always shallow and sometimes mere nonsense; his satire 
may lack the large Olympian sweep of Dryden ; but he looked on 
society, and on humanity as that society happened for the time to 
express it, with an unclouded eye, and he expressed his views with 
a pen that never stumbled, never made slips of form, and always said 
the right thing in the right way, when we once accept scheme and 
time and man. 

Pope, a young man at his beginnings but very precocious, began 
to be copied, or to be revolted from, with almost unexampled 
earliness ; but the imitators and rebels may best be left for future 
treatment. We shall deal here with those of his contemporaries 
whom dates or other things excuse from the charge of being either, 
though some even of these may have felt his mighty influence. 
We have noted the poetical works of Swift and Addison under their 
names earlier; we may here take Garth, Blackmore, Prior, Con- 
greve. Gay, Parnell, Young, a few minors, and — a friendly but, though 
she knew it not, deadly foe — Lady Winchelsea. 



CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORx\RIES IN VERSE 555 

Samuel Garth,i a strong Whig, but popular with both parties, and 
of very great repute as a physician, was born at Bolam in Durham as 
early as 1660, went to Cambridge (Peterhouse), where 
he remained till he took his M.D. in 1691, and spent the 
rest of his life practising in London. He was the friend, physician, 
and interrer of Dryden, was familiar with all the Queen Anne men, 
was knighted at George I.'s accession, and died in 1718. Garth owes 
his place in English literature, which ought to be no mean one, to 
the fact that his poem The Dispensary was published in 1699, before 
Dryden's death, and that its versification makes advances on 
Dryden's own in Pope's direction. Its subject, a doctors' quarrel, 
does not give us much amusement now, though it has some interest 
as starting a long line of more or less similar poems on less or more 
unpromising subjects during tlie century. Garth followed it up many 
years later, after he had strengthened The Dispensary itself with some 
of its best parts, by a poem on Clare/noni, and translated some Ovid. 
But the help which he gave to the perfecting of the couplet in this 
form is his title to memory. 

The most notorious verse-writer, after Garth, of the interregnum 
between Pope and Dryden was the luckless Sir Richard Blackmore, 
one of the small and curious company who have been made immortal 
by their satirists. Born about 16150, at Corsham, in 

., , , . ^ r \ , r 1 Blackmore. 

Wilts, he spent a long tune at Oxford, and afterwards 
took his M.D. at Padua. He had a good practice, and the "Quack 
Maurus " of Dryden, whom he censured and who hit back, does not 
appear to have had any special justification. He seems to have begun 
to write verse to pass the time as he drove from patient to patient, 
and he published the long poems of Prince Arthur (1695), King 
Arthur {i6()'j),Job (I'joo), Eliza (1705), and Creation (1712), besides 
essays, psalms, etc. He died in 1729, having been still more unmerci- 
fully ridiculed by the wits of the second generation. Creation^- how- 
ever, was highly praised, not merely by Addison, to whom piety 
and Whiggery combined would have been an irresistible bribe, but by 
Jolinson, to whom the second quality would have neutralised the first. 
It is difficult for a reader of the present day to share their admiration. 
Creation supplies (as, for the matter of that, do the other poems, 
so far as the present writer knows them) tolerable rhetoric in verse 
occasionally not bad. But this is a different thing from poetry. 
Blackmore's couplets are often enjambed ; and it seems (indeed he 
boasted of it) that he knew little 'of the popular poetry of his day. 
Congreve ^ deserves such a niche as he has in purely poetical 

1 Garth and Congreve, with all the writers that follow except Lady Winchelsea, 
are in Chalmers. 

^ In Chalmers, vol. x. ; the rest, must be sought in the original. 



55(J THE AUGUSTAN AGKS book viii 

history as the producer of a few songs very much in the character of 
those mentioned earlier as the last product of the Cavalier muse, but 
with more of the order and neatness of the eighteenth 
century. He is sometimes impudent, but rarely, like 
the Dorsets and the Sedleys, merely coarse, and the note of the 
careless fine gentleman which he so much affected in his life does 
appear in his poems, especially by comparison with Prior, whom, 
though he falls far short of him in nature, tenderness, whimsical 
wit, and suspicion of higher and deeper feeling, he excels in that 
indescribable and sometimes denied, but quite real, quality called 
breeding. Ambrose Philips and Thomas Tickell were both friends 
of Addison and (whether of their own choice or as a result of Pope's 
irritable vanity is uncertain) enemies of Pope. The former — to be 
carefully distinguished from John Philips (i 676-1 708), author of the 
admirable Miltonic burlesque of the Splendid Shilling and of a good 
poem, or at least verse-essay, on Cider — was born in Leicestershire in 
1671, and died in London in 1749. His short sentimental verses 
to children gained him from Carey (the author of " Sally in our 
Alley") the nickname of " Namby-Pamby." which has passed into 
the language as a common epithet. Tickell. a Cumberland man and 
a fellow of Queen's College, Oxford (i 676-1 740), is chiefly re- 
membered for two splendid couplet-elegies on Addison (whose 
devoted friend he was) and on Marlborough's lieutenant Cadogan. 
The majesty which this particular form could put on has seldom been 
better shown, except in the final lines of The Dunciad. But we must 
turn to men of more poetical substance. 

Matthew Prior,i the king of " verse of society " in English, was 
born near Wimborne in 1664, and was educated at Westminster, 
going thence to Cambridge, but to St. John's, not, as usual with his 
schoolfellows, to Trinity. He took his degree in 1686, 
and obtained a Fellowship, which he kept through life, 
and which kept him at some times of it. He wrote a bad parody of 
The Hind and the Panther in conjunction with Montague, afterwards 
Halifax, but did nothing else till he was of middle age, though he 
enjoyed to the full the copious if transient stream of patronage of 
men of letters, which his coadjutor did much to set running. He 
was even Ambassador to France ; was deeply engaged in the still 
obscure intrigues which just failed to seat James HL on the throne 
of England at his sister's death ; is suspected of having turned king's 
evidence, but was imprisoned foi" some years. He had published 

1 In Chalmers, and common in editions from liis own gorgeous fclio down- 
wards. Mr. Austin Dobson's Selected Poems of Prior (" ParchmerU^ Libiary," 
London, 1889) contains most things of much value but not all, the change of man» 
ncrs sometimes making Prior ditificult to reproduce nowadays. 



cii. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 557 

poems in 1709, and issued another collection in splendid form after 
his liberation in 1718. He did not long survive this, and died in 
1 72 1. He was, though an intimate, somewhat of a detached 
intimate of the literary society of his time, and is said frankly to have 
preferred less distinguished associates. 

The works of Prior are rather numerous than voluminous, and 
they are very curiously assorted. The only pieces of any bulk are 
Alma, or The Progress of the Mind, and Solomon, or The Vanity of the 
World. The first, divided into three cantos, is an extremely 
fantastic, though, according to most (not all) critics, somewhat 
tedious poem in Hudibrastic verse, and quite openly imitating 
Butler in style as well as in metre. Although, however, the guise is 
burlesque, the subject-matter is by no means wholly so ; and Prior, 
tlie lightness of whose best-known work has perhaps rather obscured 
tlie fact that he was a scholar and a man of no small reading, has 
put a good deal of thought as well as of learning in an ill-chosen 
fa.shion. Solomon, which is also in three divisions (here called 
"books"), is in heroic couplets of a rather Drydenian than Popian 
cast, with frequent Alexandrines. Here too the poem is much better 
worth reading than is usually thought ; but the author's inability to be 
frankly serious again shows itself. His treatment of Vanity has 
neither the bitter quintessence of Swift, nor the solemn and some- 
times really tragic declamation of Young, nor that intense conviction 
and ethical majesty which make Johnson's Vanity of Humati Wishes 
almost a great poem, and beyond all question a great piece of litera- 
ture. His next most important works in point of bulk are a handlul 
of tales after the manner of La Fontaine, for which the rigid Johnson 
himself made a famous excuse, but which, though they contain somu 
of their author's earliest and pleasantest writing, make their appear- 
ance not at all, or with considerable difficulty and adjustment, in 
modern volumes intended for general reading. Longer than these, 
indeed, are the Carmen Seculare, a dull Pindaric to William the 
Deliverer, and Henry a)id Emma, an ill-judged modernising of the 
exquisite Nut-brown Maid, but they form no part of Prior's title to 
fame. 

This, which is completely indefeasible, rests upon a cloud of 
bright trifles, or things pretty serious within but bright and trifling 
in appearance, heterogeneous enough in subject and form, but all 
animated by the same dainty, whimsical touch in metre, phrase, and 
poetic style. He can be merely sentimental and achieve mere senti- 
ment charmingly ; impudently but triumphantly caricaturing, as in 
his parody of Boileau's fustian on the taking of Namur ; arch, in the 
best sense of that almost obsolete and long misused but really useful 
word, as in a hundred pieces of which *' Cloe and Euphelia " stands 



55S THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

perhaps first in order in his collected works ; deliberately but 
exquisitely trivial, as* in " The Secretary." Prior has never been 
approached in the lighter love-poem of a certain kind, such as " The 
Lover's Anger," or " Dear Cloe, how blubbered is that pretty face ! " 
For all his easy morality, no juster, shrewder, and more good-natured 
life-philosophy was ever put than in "An English Padlock." What 
may be more surprising to those who do not see from the first that 
Prior was no mere wit but a true humourist is that his gaiety can, 
with an imperceptible turn, admit a real and a most melancholy 
wisdom, as in the beautiful and justly famous " Lines written in the 
beginning of Mezeray's History of France." In the mere epigram, 
such as those on Dr. Radcliffe, on Bibo, and others, where only wit is 
wanted, he is supreme ; his verses to children, especially the famous 
''Child of Quality," defy competition; the ''Epitaph on Jack and 
Joan " shows, like some other things of his, how keen a knowledge 
of humanity underlay his apparently frivolous ways; and in "Down 
Hall," the narrative of a trip into Essex, he set an example of lighter 
narrative verse in easy anapaestics which has been regularly followed 
and perhaps never improved upon, since. 

This last brings us to one of Prior's greatest historical merits. 
Tlie tyranny of the couplet was severe enough on the eighteenth 
century as it was. But it would have been worse still if this 

poet, influential in position and friendships, attrac- 
imp^tance. ^ivc in subject, and of an exquisite skill in his art, had 

not evaded that tyranny by writing verse for lighter pur- 
poses in anaptestic measures, in the octosyllable, and in various lyric 
forms. The anapaestic tetrameter, in particular, may be said to have 
almost owed its matriculation in the list of permitted metres to Prior. 
Dryden had used it, but chiefly in compositions intended definitely 
for music, in which it was no novelty, having been used for ballads 
and songs time out of mind. But it had been regarded as a sort of 
" blind fiddler's measure " — good enough for -' Drolleries " and " Gar- 
lands " and so forth, but scarcely worthy of " The Muses." Prior 
accomplished its presentation to these punctilious divinities once for 
all. Henceforward the correctest poet felt that there was no crime 
in now and then deserting couplet for these freer measures ; and as a 
matter of fact we find in them by far the larger part of the real poetry 
of the eighteenth century. 

Something of the same beneficent influence was exercised by John 
Gay,^ who, though a far less exquisite and original poet than Prior, 

1 Very popular in the eighteenth century ; a little neglected in this. Amends, 
however, have recently been made in two very pretty editions, of the Fables by Mr. 
Austin Dolison (London, 1882), and of the whole Poems by Mr. Underbill (2 vols, 
London, 1893). ' 



CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONl'EMPORARIES IN VERSE 559 

had perhaps more special sympathy for the country, as opposed to the 
town, than "Dear Mat." He was born in the same year 
(1688) with Pope, at Barnstaple, in the county which ^^" 

contains the most exquisite mixture of scenery in England, but he 
seems to have thought himself more at home 

Where Catherine Street descends into the Strand 

than on the banks of the Taw or in the hill-solitudes of its springs. 
His family was no ill one, but poor, and he was apprenticed to* a silk 
mercer in London. From this unpromising occupation he passed to 
that of secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth, Anne Scott, the 
-charming Annabel" of Dryden. In 1713 he published a poem on 
" Rural Sports," containing some description more vivid and direct than 
the age generally showed, and dedicated it to Pope. Introduction to 
the wits and the patrons followed, and Gay had a small share, and 
apparently might have had, but for laziness and indiscretion, a larger 
one, in the golden shower still falling on men of letters. The same 
qualities prevented him from making his fortune in the South Sea 
Bubble — for Craggs gave him stock, he would not sell during the 
craze, and lost everything — and perhaps contributed to defeat his 
expectations from George II. But he was one of those fortunate, 
helpless persons whom everybody helps, and the Duke and Duchess 
of Oueensberry took him into their household, managed his money for 
him (he made a good deal by the Beg^^ar'^s Opera), and prevented him 
from having any need of it. He died at the end of 1732, too lazy even 
to make a will. The traditional character of him as of a kind of human 
lapdog, without any vice except extreme self-indulgence, has been little 
disturbed. 

His earliest poem, IVvie, published some years before that above 
noticed, in 1708, belongs to the same class as John Philips's pieces, 
clever enough Miltonic parody. In Rural Sports he shifted to the 
inevitable couplet, which again he wrote well ; in fact, Gay did nothing 
ill, he only wanted initiation and distinction. T/ie ShepheriVs Week 
(17 14) relapsed on parody, the subject being now Virgil and Spenser, 
or rather the namby-pamby imitators of both. The mock-heroic 
couplets of this are often happy, if not very strong. But Gay's skill in 
this kind reached its acme in Trivia, or The Art of Walking the 
Streets of London (1715), which is one of the most vivid things of the 
sort ever done, and for all its rather teasing falsetto, remains a docu- 
ment for the subject and a pleasant poem in itself. His Epistles 
exhibit the same pleasing, if somewhat uninspired, accomplishment, and 
his Eclogues might sometimes be Pope and sometimes Young. It is 
more to his real credit that he had a lyrical gift possessed by neither 



56o THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii 

of these, his greater contemporaries. The immortal, if conventional, 
" Black-Eyed Susan," the more genuine " 'Twas when the seas were 
roaring," the most musical ^* Phyllida" song, and a great many others, 
have sometimes more sweetness than Prior, though seldom as much 
air and fire. His dramatic pieces, .4cis and Galatea, and still more 
the Beggar'' s Opera, are yet unforgotten. He wrote Tales, again very 
like Prior's ; and lastly, there are his once universall)', and still widely, 
known Fables. They have been for some time neglected, which is a 
pity, for they are perennial sense expressed in good, though not 
quite perennial, verse. Gay could do almost anything that his friends 
told him to do or that he had a model for ; but he required these 
assistances. 

With Edward Young ^ we come to a poet of greater originality 
and force, but of much less equal achievement, than Gay, a poet 
who in more ways than one represents a development independent 
of Pope, and to some extent reactionary from the move- 
ment which Pope represented. Young was not merely 
Pope's senior ; he actually, in the Universal Passion (1725-28), pre- 
ceded that writer in his special form of satire, and did nearly, if not 
quite, as well in it as Pope himself at his very best. But the major 
part of his work is of a kind very different from Pope's. He was 
born in Hampshire in the year 1681, went to Oxford, and obtaining 
one of the then very rare Fellowships (at All Souls) which were not 
necessarily clerical, did not take orders till late in life. He is said 
to have at last done so from ambition, and disappointment in his 
hopes of preferment is credited with at least part of the gloom of 
the Night-Thoughts. He did not die till 1765, having published 
verse, Resignation, as late as three years earlier. He was a play- 
wriglit. and his play of The Revenge was long very popular. His 
non-dramatic verse is copious, and its merit varies in the strangest 
degree. 

Young's first poem was The Last Day, published in 1713. It, 
like The Force of Religion, which followed it a year later, is in 
couplets, and both poems display Young's peculiar and, to modern 
tastes, not very pleasant mixture of probably sincere, but gloomy and 
bombastically expressed, religious awe, together with an exaggeration 
of that flattery of " the great " on earth which seventeenth and 
eighteenth century feeling permitted, if it did not actually demand. 
There are, however, very fine things in The Last Day, and it is the 
best piece on any great scale that he did, except the Night-Thoughts. 
The Force of Religion, on the story of Lady Jane Grey and her 
husband, is mawkish and sometimes ridiculous. There could be few 

1 In Chalmers, but not rccentlv edited as a whole 



CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 561 

greater contrasts than the seven satires of Love of Fa/ne, or The Uni- 
versal Passion, which followed at about ten years' interval. As 
observed above. Pope is anticipated, and all but equalled, in these 
vigorous compositionsj where the artificiality of the treatment is 
excused by that of the subjects, and where Young shows himself a 
past master, not merely of the crack but of the sting, of the couplet 
lash. Then we come upon Ocean, an Ode (1728), which, like all 
Young's other odes (^Iniperiuni Pelagi, 1729, etc.), affords examples, 
hard to be excelled in the works of the meanest writers, of the 
unintentional mock heroic, and then to The Co7/iplaint, or Night- 
TJio lights. 

It is difficult to give even a guess whether this remarkable poem 
will ever recover much or anything of the great reputation which it 
long held, and which, for two generations at least, it has almost 
entirely lost. It has against it. the application of phrase and even 
of thought, merely of an age, to the greatest and most lasting subjects, 
and a tone only to be described as the theatrical-religious. Its 
almost unbroken gloom frets or tires according to the mood and 
temperament of the reader. On the other hand, the want of sincerity 
is always more apparent than real, and the moral strength and know- 
ledge of human nature, which were the great merits of the eighteenth 
century, appear most unmistakably. Above all, the poem deserves 
the praise due to very fine and, in part at least, very original versi- 
fication. If Young here deserts the couplet, it is, as we have seen, 
by no means because he cannot manage it ; it is because he is at 
least partly dissatisfied with it, and sees that it will not serve his 
turn. And his blank verse is a fine and an individual kind. Its 
fault, due, no doubt, to his practice in drama, is that it is a little too 
declamatory, a little too suggestive of soliloquies in an inky cloak 
with footlights in front. But this of itself distinguishes it from the 
blank verse of Thomson, which came somewhat earlier. It is not 
a direct imitation either of Milton or of Shakespeare, and deserves to 
be ranked by itself. The Night-Thonghts, which were late (1742- 
44), were at once Young's best work and his last good work. Resig- 
nation is much weaker, but not quite dotage. 

Thomas Parnein may also be classed as an unconscious rebel. 
He was of a good Cheshire family, but was born in Dublin in 1679; 
entered Trinity College, took his degree and orders, and in 1705 
was made Archdeacon of Clogher. Swift introduced 
him to Harley and converted him to Toryism, but the 
change of dynasty made his conversion infructuous, though Swift 
procured further preferment for him from Archbishop King. He is 

1 Ed. Aitken, London, 1894. 



562 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book xiu 

said to have felt the death of his wife very severely, and himself died 
young in 1717. 

It is curious that, out of the small bulk of Parneirs poetical work, 
poetical criticism of the most various times and tastes has been able 
to pick quite different things to sustain his reputation. The famous 
''Hermit" has kept its place in all anthologies; Goldsmith extolled 
the translations, and Johnson endorsed his views, though he himself 
liked the "Allegory on Man" best. And later censorship, which 
finds the " Hermit " not much more than a smooth and ingenious 
exercise in verse, and the translations and imitations unimportant, 
has lavished praise on two small pieces, " The Night-Piece on Death " 
and the " Hymn to Contentment," the former of which certainly 
displays nature-painting of a kind unknown in the work of any but one 
contemporary, while the return of the second to the Conius alternation 
of trocliaic and iambic cadence is an almost equally important, though 
doubtless unintended, protest against the ceaseless iambs of the 
couplet. It is not possible to call Parnell a great poet as he stands ; 
but the quality and the variety of his accomplishment show that in 
slightly different circumstances and in other times he would probably 
have been one. 

The other exception, a notice of whom may fitly conclude this 
chapter and this Book, was Anne, Countess of Winchelsea. Lady 
Winchelsea was the daughter of Sir William Kingsmill, and was born 
in Hampshire about the time of the Restoration. She 
WiJchtlsea. ^"^^^ ^'•'^'^y years later, in 1720, having been a friend of 
the wits (she is Pope's Ardelia) and herself a consider- 
able practitioner in verse. She wrote The Spleen, a Pindaric ode 
(1701), The Prodioy (1706), Miscellany Poems (1714), the publica- 
tion which, almost by a lucky accident, has revived her memory, and 
a tragedy, Aristomencs. The accident referred to was the mention 
of her by Wordsworth in his famous polemical essay appended to the 
Lyrical Ballads in 181 5, where he excepts her Nocturnal Reverie 
(with an odd companion. Pope's IVindsor Forest) from his sweeping 
denunciation of the poetry between Paradise Lost and The Seasons, 
as " not containing a single new image of external nature." The 
statement is not by any means tme, or rather its exaggeration swamps 
what truth it has, but the commendation of Lady Winchelsea is 
deserved. It is a jjity that her poems have not been reprinted and 
are difficult of access, for it is desirable to read the whole in order to 
appreciate the unconscious clash of style and taste in them.^ 

It is not a little noteworthy that Lady Winchelsea began as a 
Pindaric writer. The imitators of Cowley (unless Dryden is classed 

^ The Reverie and some other pieces will be found in Ward's Poets, vol. iii. 



en. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 563 

among them) have been not altogether unjustly regarded as having 
furnished one of the most uninviting divisions of English poetry, and 
it is no doubt in part due to them that the couplet, as a revolt, obtained 
its sway. But Cowley, though even in him the high and passionate 
spirit of the earlier poetry was dropping and falling, still preserved 
something of it, and '' flights " were necessary to a Pindaric. Fortu- 
nately for Lady Winchelsea, natural taste and the opportunities of life 
seem to have inclined her to take natural objects as the source of 
her imagery. What pla^e suggested the A^octunial Reverie we cannot 
say, but it is clearly a corrected impression and not merely conven- 
tional. It is all seen: the waving moon on the river, the sleepy 
cowslip, the foxglove, paler than by day, but chequering still with red 
the dusky brakes, and the wonderful image of the horse, take us 
almost a century away from the drawing-rooms and the sham 
shepherdesses of her contemporaries. And she could manage the 
shortened octosyllable even better than Parnell, could adjust the 
special epithet (Pope borrowed or stole "aromatic pain" from her, 
though probably she took it from Dryden's "aromatic splinters"). 
Altogether she is a most remarkable phenomenon, too isolated to 
point much of a moral, but adorning the lull of early eighteenth-century 
poetry with images even more correct than Thomson's, and put in 
language far less artificial 



INTERCHAPTER VIII 

In hardly any period of English literature (thougli the old caution as 
to the constant overlapping of tendencies, the constant or regular 
coincidence of the receding and flowing tides, has still to be repeated) 
are the general characteristics so distinct and so uniform as in that 
which has been surveyed in the Book just concluded. Survivors of 
the older poetry and prose reach, in actual life, to within a very few 
years of the birth of forerunners of styles not yet extinct — nay, by the 
help of a nondescript like Lady Winchelsea, it may be said that there 
is no breach of continuity, even in nature-poetry of the strictest kind, 
from Appleton House to Grongar Hill. But always the exception.5, 
though in the time, are not of it ; always those who are of the time 
show one complexion in poetry, in prose, and, at bottom, in drama. 
Yet even the nature of that complexion has not been entirely undis- 
puted, and the name of it has been the subject of much contest. 
We need not concern ourselves with such question-begging, clumsy, 
and yet incomplete appellatives as '• Gallo-Classic." This is the 
really important question — Is it just to call the age from 1660 to 
1740, eminently the age from 1660 to 1800, more or less an "Age 
of Prose " in the depreciatory sense, and to deny to Dryden and to 
Pope the title of classics of our poetry ? And we may answer it 
shortly. It is just to call the Augustan age, or ages, ages, by com- 
parison, of prose ; it is not just to deny to them, and especially to 
their greatest representatives, a share, though again by comparison, 
of poetry. 

At the Restoration the country unquestionably turned to business. 
It had not quite done with its religious, its constitutional, its dynastic 
strifes. It was not to have finished with the first, even generally, for 
some years, with the second for some decades, with the third till a 
period actually later than the death of Pope and coincident with 
that of Swift. But it was in the mind to have done with them, to 
let " the great questions " alone, to turn to shop and merchandise, to 
" projects," to practical studies, and while by no means abandoning 
philosophy, to take the most practical branches of that art — ethics, 

564 



BOOK VIII INTERCHAPTER VIII 565 

politics. t]ie grosser psychology. It wanted literary media that would 
suit these purposes, that would accord with scientific treatises, histories, 
business accounts of voyage and travel telling where a man might 
traffic in bays and says, summaries of the news and the affairs of the 
day. It had no objection to poetry as such, but insensibly its poetry 
took the same complexion ; and after, by a sort of reaction, trying 
the most extravagant, though hardly the most poetical, kind of 
tragedy or drama ever seen, it relapsed ujDon a comedy artificial 
indeed, but artificial not in the least in the direction of the ideal. 

In all three departments the tendency was shown most of all by 
the creation of a new style — of a style in which poetry and prose 
drew together in an almost unnatural alliance. The quest of the 
unadorned becomes almost fanatical, and, as we have seen, some- 
times becomes a mere acquiescence in the down-at-heel. Only in 
the lower rhetoric is bedizenment sought — save for Irony, the sole one 
of the greater figures which almost necessitates simplicity. Fancy, pro- 
vided she know s her place, is tolerated ; but Imagination is kept well 
at a distance ; a flight is perdition, a conceit at best danger. Above 
all, a sort of crusade is preached and practised against the individual ; 
and the general (which rapidly becomes the conventional) is alone 
orthodox. To understand the period, perhaps there is no better way 
than to read those papers of Addison's on the Imagination, which 
some persons have strangely taken as if the word were used as 
Coleridge might have used it. The Imagination, we find, is that 
which supplies images ; and her supply is to be strictly limited to 
what the senses prove and what correct tradition approves. 

These characteristics of the time are not really deniable : it 
cannot be seriously contended, except as a matter of rhetorical 
'• colour," that in passing from Shakespeare through Dryden to 
Pope, we do not pass from the upper through the middle air to earth. 
But it is by no means necessary, while granting this, to belittle, much 
less to abuse, the Augustan ages. They had their own work to do 
and they did it — a good deal better perhaps than some ages which 
have announced more ambitious tasks. They had, in the first place, 
to get English grammar settled for prose use at least ; to establish 
something like a recognised dictionary, and to elaborate something 
like fixed rules of composition — something which would dissuade the 
greater writers from attempting the vagaries of Clarendon and 
Milton, and safeguard the smaller from the disasters into which 
men like Milton and Clarendon could never wholly fall. They had, 
even in poetry, to create a sort of etiquette which should prevent 
even really fine poetic frenzy from describing the eyes of the 
Magdalene as portable baths and compendious oceans ; to add to 
the metrical exercises of English a course of the neat, smart, limited 



566 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book via 

drill which was the only gymnastic it had yet lacked ; to get, as a 
reaction from this, the wholly trisyllabic metres (hitherto neglected) 
into order for comic work first and then for serious. 

And all this they did. They did not (as Johnson thought in 
Dryden's case) " find Rome of brick and leave it of marble " ; but 
they did find the literary city ill-organised, unpoliced, w^ith none of 
these contemned arrangements for ''gas and water" which add so 
much to the convenience of life. And they did leave it very fairly 
drained, paved, lighted, watered, and equipped with constables. Nor 
had they much to be ashamed of in regard to the actual edifices which 
they added. To speak of the verse of Dryden with any kind of 
contempt or belittlement is to go very near the absurd. The same 
may be said of the best verse-couplet of Pope and the best light 
verse of Prior ; each, like Dryden, is .supreme in his own way. Nor 
must we say much less of the prose of Addison and of Berkeley, 
while we must say a great deal more of Swift. His life practically 
covered the entire time, and who shall say that a time throughout the 
whole of which Swift was living need vail its bonnet in the presence 
of any time ancient or modern ? 

Yet it may be admitted that, though it could produce great men 
and even greatest, this production was not its own special business. 
Its business was to do what has been described above, and moreover 
to extend the domains of literature, by opening up fresh provinces and 
arranging equipment for settling them. It allowed nothing to die, 
though it certainly left the drama in a state of perilously suspended 
animation. On the contrary, it saw, though only in the beginning, the 
revival of much and the positive admission of more. It got the 
Essay thoroughly into shape ; it left the novel and the regular history 
born, or just ready to be born ; it set flying new species of lighter 
verse ; and it. saw at least several further developments of periodical 
literature, though not the fullest. 

^ Above all, it shaped, to a degree not yet much bettered, the 
lighter form of English verse, and it arranged, in a matter not yet 
altered in essentials at all, the general form of English prose. It 
would be scarcely paradox to say that, on the whole, we have rather 
reverted, and diverged from our points of reversion, than made any 
positive advances since the deaths of Pope and Swift. We have, at 
any rate, been much more indebted to the past, much less original 
in our apparently most daring innovations, than were the patronised, 
the pitied, the not seldom abused and despised, ''ages of prose 
and sense." 



BOOK IX 

MIDDLE AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY 
LITERATURE 

CHAPTER I 

THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 

Thomson — His life — His minor poems — The Seasons — The Castle of Indolence 
— Dyer— Blair and Green — Shenstone — Collins — Gray — Byrom, Savage, 
and others — • Akenside — Resurrection of the Ballad : Percy and others — Dods- 
ley's Miscellany — Smart — Mason — Falconer — The Wartons — Churchill — 
Chatterton — Bealtie — Langhorne and Mickle — Covvper — Crabbe — Blake — 
Burns — His predecessors from Ramsay to Fergusson — His poetic quality 

/AMES Thomson, the first Scotsman after the Union to contribute 
matter of very great value to English literature, was born in September 
1700 at Ednam, in Roxburghshire. His grandfather had been only 
a gardener, his father was minister of the parish, and 
had married Beatrix Trotter, daughter of a yeoman pro- 
prietor. Very shortly after Thomson's birth, his father was transferred 
to Southdean, a parish in the same county, but nearer the Border, in 
fact, on the Scottish slopes of the Cheviots. There is no doubt that 
much of Thomson's hardly excelled knowledge of natural aspects was 
obtained here ; the sterner part certainly was. He was educated at a 
school in Jedburgh, whence, at the age of fifteen, he went to the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh ; and as his father soon after died, the family 
moved to that city. Thomson's stay at Edinburgh, as then usual in 
the case of divinity students, was a prolonged one — some nine years ; 
but he had little vocation, and in 1725 went to London to seek his 
fortune. He had some initial difficulties, but his college friend David 
Malloch, or Mallet, helped him, and before long he became tutor in 
Lord Binning's family. Winter was published in March 1726, was 

567 



568 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

successful from the first, and brought him many friends (including 
Pope) and patrons. He continued 77^1? Seasons {Summer, 1727; 
Spring, 1728), which were finished with Anttimn in 1730, wrote 
some bad tragedies (especially SopJionisba, 1729), and went with 
a pupil on the Continent. His tour seems to have furnished him 
with the materials of his Liberty. 

It was in 1733 that Lord Chancellor Talbot, father of his pupil (who 
was now dead), appointed Thomson to a post in Chancery, which he 
only lost through negligence, and which was the first of a series of 
XT- yr appointments, pensions, and the like (the chief being the 
surveyorship of the Leeward Islands), sufficient to keep 
him in comfort for the rest of his life. This was passed near Richmond, 
a literary neighbourhood as well as one congenial to a lover of nature. 
The extreme indolence which is the best-known feature of his later 
years sometimes exposed him to difficulties, and he was unfortunate 
in a late, and perhaps rather lukewarm, passion for a certain Miss 
Young, "Amanda." He died in 1748. Like Gay and other men of 
letters of the time, both English and French, Thomson seems to have 
deserved Cowley's description of the grasshopper as an- " Epicurean 
animal." Initiative was not his forte, even Winter seems to have 
been suggested by similarly named poems of an early friend, one 
Riccaltoun. But no vice at all detestable seems to have been 
charged, much less proved, against him. The eighteenth century 
was a bad time for men of his temperament, and its early years, in 
which the brilliant luck of Addison and Prior, and the great money 
gains of Pope, served by turns to encourage and dishearten, were 
particularly bad for men of letters. If Thomson's inertia could be, 
as it has sometimes been, charged to Miss Young's unkindness, he 
might be a little more interesting, but it seems to have begun earlier; 
and after all a want of energy, not improbably constitutional, is no 
unpardonable sin. 

Thomson's poetical works ^ are among the most important in the 
history of English poetry, though they cannot be exactly ranked 
among the best of English poems. Appearing as they did at the 
very same time with the most perfect and polished work of Pope, 
they served as an antidote to that great writer's " town " poetry. 
Couched as the best of them were in blank verse, or in the Spenserian 
stanza, they showed a bold front to the insolent domination of the 
stopped couplet. Becoming almost instantly popular, and retaining 
their popularity, they supplied for full seventy years a perpetual 

1 Almost the whole of the poets of this chapter will he found in Chalmers, 
though not always (notably in the case of Smart's Song to David) complete. 
Many are in the " Aldine Poets," and have been recently and well re-edited. Only 
important special editions will be noted. 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 569 

corrective to the least poetical tendencies of the poetry of the day. 
Nor can there be any doubt that their etificacy in this way was in- 
creased by a peculiarity which has lessened their influence and their 
vogue during the present century. Thomson stood apart from the 
Augustan "school in his subjects of interest and in his selection of 
metres. But he shared, and rather went beyond, the predilection of 
that school for a peculiar stilted "poetic diction," partly founded on 
the classicalism of Milton, but largely tempered from less genuine 
sources. Nobody, who has the slightest tincture of catholic poetical 
taste, can defend such a phrase as — 

See where the winding vale its lavish stores 
Irrigiious spreads, 

which is on a par with the worst fashionable faults of any time. 
But these phrases baited the hook for his own days, and they can be, 
except for historical purposes, neglected in these — just as we have 
already learnt to neglect, and sometimes to enjoy, mediaeval stock 
phrase, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conceit, and as, no doubt, 
a future time will half neglect and half enjoy the tricks on which 
writers of our own time pride themselves. 

These works comprise three long poems, and a certain, but not 
large, number of smaller ones. Of the first class a merciful posterity 
has agreed to forget Liberty, though unwise partisans sometimes 
attempt to drag it out for judgment. The result, before 
competent judges, can at best be a recommendation to poenis°'^ 
mercy. The piece is a Whig prize-poem, in five parts, 
dealing consecutively with Italy, Greece, Rome, Britain, and "A 
Prospect." The vehicle is blank verse of the same pattern as that 
in which the more artificial passages of The Seasons are couched. 
The sentiment is of that kind which was finally made hateful to gods 
and men by the orators of the French Revolution — a "dull-snuffling" 
compound of Brutus and Tully, and the Retreat of the Ten Thousand, 
King Alfred, and the Immortal Nassau. The Goddess of Liberty is 
the main speaker through the whole, and sometimes she speaks 
well. Except by Dryden, the licensed flattery of friends and patrons 
has seldom been better put than in the exordium dealing with the 
poet's dead pupil Talbot, and that pupil's father ; the picture of the 
Campagna shows the poet of The Seasons ; the passage on modern 
Italy beginning — 

What would you say, ye conquerors of earth ! 

is declamation become eloquence ; the Ten Thousand piece is even 
better; and the sketch of Roman history in the third book is clever. 



5-;r> MIDDLE AND LATER 18TII-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

But the whole is hopeless. Nor need much be said of the minor 
poems. Only the delicate and charming, though artificial — 

Tell me, thou soiii: of her I Mve, 

and the graceful " Nuptial Song for Sophonisba," must be excepted 
from faint praise, or by no means faint condemnation. 

The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence ^ are an entirely 
different matter. About neither is any mistake possible to those 
who know poetry. In the successive editions of The Seasons 
Thomson made many changes, and his editors have 
not yet fully coped with them. But between the earliest 
Winter of 1726 and the latest complete Seasons there are not 
differences sufficient to interfere with the general position of the 
book and its author in English poetry. Thomson was not entirely 
above the cant and fashion of his time, either in thought or in 
phrase. But his glory and his salvation lay in the fact that he was 
born with, and had cultivated, the gift of looking straight at nature, 
and of reporting the result of his observation in words. He never 
lost this gift. He saw the view from Richmond Hill, and the lazy 
luxuriance of the Thames Valley, just as inevitably and unmistakingly 
as he had seen the snow-storms of the Carter and the spates of the 
Jed. He had such a genius at the thing that, even in describing 
what he had never seen — the merely book-learnt scenes of foreign 
countries — he is not much, though somewhat less, convincing than 
wlien he touches off the wallflower, or the birds at the approach of 
rain, or the disturbance of the trout by sheep-washing. In a thou- 
sand casual strokes, as well as in the well-known set pieces of The 
Seasons, this infallible observation and this admirable if not always 
consummate expression show themselves. As compositions, all the 
four lie, no doubt, open to exception. There is a good deal of 
padding, and it is often weak. A certain amount of the matter has 
the cant common to declaimers, and a certain further amount has 
the sentimentality, the artificiality, and the other faults of the time. 
But even these, in the company where we find them, add a certain 
flavour. It is impossible to believe that The Seasons will ever be read 
without admiration and delight by fit persons. They have, if not the 
charm of the absolutely best and highest literature, yet that of the 
next, and still not too extensive, class, that which combines an 
excellent adherence to tnith of fact with a more than competent 
skill in art. For their time, and tlierefore for history, they were of 
simply paramount importance, but tliey have a charm not merely of 
their time. 

1 The best edition is that of Mr. J. Logic Robertson for the Clarendon 
I'rcss. 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 571 

Poetically speaking, Thomson went far higher in The Castle of 
Indolence, which closed, as Winter had opened, his poetical career; 
and it so happened that its lesson was not mucli less im- 
portant for his time. Spenser had never wholl}' gone out '^^^dolence"'^ 
of favour,! though both Tliomson himself and Slienstone 
{vide infra) thought it safest to imitate his "Gothick" form with a 
touch of burlesque. But the virtue of the magnificent stanza almost 
completely conquered this ; and the charms of The Castle of Indolence 
are not those of a parody, but those of a great poem, which happens 
to bear the image and superscription of a greater. Almost at once 
the poet is carried away, and the famous picture of the dale of 
Indolence is almost as noble a thing as we shall find anywhere in 
eighteenth-century poetry. The very spirit of the stanza, its long- 
drawn, sleepy, yet never sluggish melody, passes with the murmuring 
sound of it into the poet's song. Nor does it ever fully leave him, 
despite his occasional struggles to get back to falsetto. The Speech 
of Indolence, itself not wholly couched in this vein, is hardly over 
before we have the wondrous stanza — 

As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles — 

the picture of the Castle, almost worthy of Spenser's self, the Mirror 
of Vanity (which shows that Thomson was not far behind Young or 
even Pope himself as a satirist), and the sketches of the guests. The 
second book is not so continuously good, because (to tell the truth) 
Thomson had no real sympathy with the Knight of Arts and 
Industry, while he had much with the fell enchanter; but it com- 
pletes the moral, without which the age would not have been 
contented. 

It is impossible to exaggerate the beneficent influence which The 
Castle of Indolence must have had in soothing, relaxing, and adjust- 
ing to true poetic feeling the ears and mind of a generation made 
half-deaf and half-nervous by the sharp scratch and rasp of the 
couplet. That its y^olian-harp music did not appeal to Johnson is 
not in the least surprising ; that something of its charm must have 
in some unexplained way kept him from expressing contempt or 
blame is very interesting. For it was, in truth, the knell of the kind 
of poetry he himself loved and practised. 

Three short poems, two in octosyllables, one in blank verse, keep 

iThe nadir of the taste for him seems to have been about the last thirty 
years of the seventeenth century. In 1686 a "Person of Quality" "delivered in 
Heroick numbers" {i.e. couplets), as Spenser Rediviviis, the Faerie Qiieene, Bk. i., 
with its author's "essential design preserved, but his obsolete language and 
manner of verse totally laid aside." In order not to do the work negligently, the 
Person of Quality has also totally laid aside " his " poetry. 



572 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

alive the memory of three poets, who were all born within a year or 
two of Thomson, while Dyer's Grotigar Hill, the most remarkable 

and the most like his work, appeared in the very year of 
^ ^' Winter. John Dyer (born ci}'ca 1688, died 1758) was a 
native of Caermarthenshire, and at first a painter by profession, but 
took orders. He wrote later and larger poems — The Ruins of Rome 
(after an actual visit there on his earlier business), The Fleece, one 
of the impossible descriptive-didactics of the century — but by their 
dates (1740 and 1757), his genuine but thin fount of originality had 
been swamped by the greater volume and more forceful genius of 
Thomson. Grongar Hill, a little poem of some 200 lines, and the 
still shorter Country Walk, are very different things. They, like 
Lady Winchelsea's work, remind us more of Marvell than of any 
later poet. Tlie rhymes in Grongar Hill are really " uncertain," and 
the grammar is sometimes dubious. But the poet sees; he clothes 
what he sees with atmosphere, and ranges it in composition ; his 
phrase is otten singularly fresh and direct, and his versification, 
though not attempting Christabel scope, uses at least the licenses of 
Comus. He was evidently, from his later work, one of those poets 
who survive their poetry ; but he was a poet. 

Robert Blair (1699-1743), minister of Athelstaneford, who pub- 
lished The Grave in 1743, and Matthew Green (1696- 1737), a clerk 
in the Custom-House, who wrote The Spleen, or at least published it, 

in 1732, were more of their time, but transcended mere 
and Green. Convention in each case. The good old Saxon gloom 

inspires Blair's verse, which has something of the dec- 
lamation of Young's, but is less florid and more nervous. As for 
The Spleen, it is one of the liveliest poems of a century which 
has many lively poems — a little Philistine and decidedly Hedonist, 
but shrewd, by no means unkindly, and shading off the indignant 
satire of its model. Swift, into an easy raillery, which almost masks 
its contempt of life. 

The name of Thomson, with those of Gray and Collins, supplies 
almost the whole poetical list of the greater poets of the middle 
eighteenth century, and hasty judgment often seeks no farther, if so 
far. On the other hand, in no period of English literature have 
minor poets made so secure a hold on memory, owing to the fact of 
Johnson's Lives, and to the enrolment of their works in the excellent 
collection of Chalmers. Nor is it, perhaps, entirely certain that, from 
some future standpoint, these poets will seem so inferior to those of the 
seventeenth and those of the nineteenth century as they seem to us. 

There is, at any rate, no lack of interesting matter in William 
Shenstone.^ If we took his prose remains, hardly to be called essays 
1 Poems only in Chalmers ; Works, 3rd ed. 3 vols. London, 1773. 



THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 573 



so much as jottings, then we should think him a very considerable 
though unequal critic, and an innovator of the most remarkable 
kind. In his actual verse we find him tentative, often ^., 

, . , -- , Slienstone. 

feeble, and nearly always mcomplete. He was born at 
the Leasowes, in a part of Worcestershire which technically belonged 
to Shropshire, in 17 14, and the greater part of his life of not quite 
fifty years (he died in 1763) was passed there, in those attempts to 
develop and improve the natural beauty of his estate which brought 
him some fame, some ridicule, and a good deal of pecuniary em- 
barrassment. But he had been educated at Pembroke College, 
Oxford (which probably made Johnson as kind to him as he could be 
to any man who liked " prospects "), he had seen something of 
fashionable society, and he continued to be intimate with persons of 
rank, as well as with persons of literature. It must never be forgotten 
that he had much to do with the appearance of Percy's Reh'qites, and 
would have edited it jointly had his life lasted. But there was on 
Shenstone the curse which attends all transition poets, aggravated in 
his case by ill-health, a nature at once shy and appetent of fame, 
and a fortune which neither provided affluence nor compelled industry. 
Of the greater poets we can say that in other times they would have 
been either silent or the same with slight and separable differences ; 
there is probably not a poem of Shenstone's which would not have 
been a perfectly different thing if he had been born in 1614 or 1814. 
A batch of elegies, neither unmusical nor thoughtless, but unfortu- 
nately artificial in phrase,^ is followed by a pot-pourri of odes, songs, 
and ballads as artificial, but more graceful, and by attempts in the 
most various kinds, of which the deservedly famous Pastoral Ballad, 
which is really four separate poems, and the charming Spenserian 
imitation of The Schoobnistress, are certainly the best. Elsewhere in 
their author's work are things not much less pretty. It is in Shen- 
stone, not in Sterne, that the sentimentalism of the eighteenth century 
finds its most genuine and unadulterated expression. And in his 
Essays we find much besides sentiment — some strangely advanced 
poetical criticism, much originality of thought, and some thoughts 
which are actually profound. 

A greater poet, less favoured by circumstance, was William Collins, 
who was born at Chichester in 1721. He was the son of a tradesman, 
but very respectably connected, and was educated at Winchester and 
Magdalen College, Oxford. But he left the University sud- 
denly. Johnson, who knew and loved him, either did not 
know or would not reveal why. Probably Collins's mental disease 
had already appeared. At any rate, he went to London at the age 

1 " And livelier far than Tyrian seemed his vest," probably suggested Camp- 
bell's still more luckless " Iberian seemed his boot." 



574 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

of about twenty-four, published (1746-47) his tiny handful of Odes 
(he had already printed Persian Eclogues, 1742, and an Epistle to 
Haiu/ie?-, 1743), and* was arrested for debt. But the booksellers, that 
maligned race, freed him on the security of a merely promised trans- 
lation of the Poetics, and soon afterwards a legacy put him at ease. 
Unfortunately his mind gave way, and after some years of partial in- 
sanity he died in 1756. His poetical work consists of a few eclogues 
in couplets of next to no value, and of a rather larger batch of odes 
in different lyrical metres, together with two or three minor pieces, 
among which are the exquisite "Dirge in Cymbeline^'* and the 
beautiful if rather artificial piece on the death of Thomson. The 
odes, on the subjects of "Pity," "Fear," "Simplicity," "The 
Poetical Character," " Patriotism " (not so named, but universally 
known as "How Sleep the Brave"), "Mercy," "Liberty," "The 
Death of Colonel Charles Ross," " Evening," " Peace." " The 
Manners," " The Passions," and " The Superstitions of the High- 
lands," are among the great texts of English poetry, if not among its 
greatest accomplishments. They are decidedly unequal, though hardly 
the worst is without something memorable. " How Sleep the Brave," 
" Liberty," " Evening " (in unrhymed verse), " Peace," the ever-famous 
" Passions," and parts of the " Highlands " ode (which never received 
Collins's final touches) are so beautiful, that a good deal of critical 
detachment is needed to appreciate them with absolute correctness. 
There is no danger of their being undervalued (as they have some- 
times been overvalued) for a touch of that quite academic re- 
publican sentiment which was characteristic of the century. And 
their wonderful music — as in the whole of "How Sleep the 
Brave," in the opening stanzas of " Liberty " (the rest is far 
inferior), in the admirable landscape-painting and soft rhythmical 
undertone which for once redeem the foolish asceticism of refusing 
rhyme in " Evening." in the consummate variety of " The Passions," 
and in large passages of " The Superstitions " — can escape none but 
the deaf. But, at the same time, the curse of artificiality was still on 
Collins. Few have read, or at any rate remember, his worst verses ; 
but even his best are never long without obvious faults. The " slow 
motion of his lines, clogged and impeded with clusters of consonants," 
which Johnson blames, often provides exactly that music which has 
been praised above. But it is imj^ossible to traverse Johnson's 
other charge, that he puts his words out of the common order, and 
this charge may be extended to a more general one, that his diction, 
though not his versification, is starched and unnatural. His model 
seems to have been, if any one, Milton ; and it is much easier to 
imitate Milton's pedantries than to borrow his genius. Yet it is 
by no means certain that Coleridge, born sixty years earlier, would 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 575 

have been as great as Collins, while Collins, born sixty years later, 
might have been even greater than Coleridge. 

But by far the most important example of the clogs and crosses 
of the time is to be found in Thomas Gray,i a man of less original 
poetical inspiration than Collins, perhaps not much more gifted in 
this way even than Shenstone, but a far better and far 
wider scholar than either, and entirely free from all un- '^^^' 

toward circumstance. Neither IMilton, nor Wordsworth, nor Tenny- 
son had greater facility for developing whatsoever poetical gifts 
were in each than had Gray. His father, like Milton's, was a 
''money-scrivener," and the poet, born in London in 1716, was sent 
to Eton, where his mother's brother was a master. There he made 
friends with Horace Walpole, and thence he went to Cambridge (Peter- 
house) . He took no degree, but read hard and widely ; travelled 
for some time with Walpole to Italy, and after returning in 1741, 
was enabled by his father's death to give up the law (to which he had 
unwillingly taken) and settle himself at Cambridge. Although he was 
never a Fellow of either, he lived all his life in two colleges, Peter- 
house and Pembroke, the change from one to the other being caused 
by an undergraduate practical joke. He would not take the Poet- 
Laureateship in 1757, but sought the Professorship of History at 
Cambridge in vain in 1762, and successfully in 1768. He never 
lectured, and died at the end of July 1771, being not yet fifty-five. 
He had written most of his few poems in early manhood or middle 
life. The first published was the famous Eton Ode (1747), and the 
" Elegy in a Country Churchyard " was then ready, though not 
printed till 1750. Besides his small handful of verse, we have from 
him some valuable Letters and Essays, and a good deal of chiefly 
classical adversaria. He planned a history of English poetry, and 
was probably the best-read man of letters of his time in Europe in 
regard to modern literature, not merely of his own country. And his 
later Letters, especially those from the Lakes in 1769, show, before those 
of most others, the rising sense of the Picturesque in literature. 

Mr. Matthew Arnold has extolled, with a nearer approach to posi- 
tive enthusiasm than was usual with him, the work of a poet whose 
temperament was not wholly unlike his own. It is easy to agree 
with Mr. Arnold that Gray's small original production was due to the 
times being out of joint with him ; less easy to think that in others 
Gray would have done much more that was original. He would 
very likely have written his history of English poetry, and he would 
almost certainly have given us some, perhaps many, volumes of 
critical essays as acute, delicate, and well-informed as Mr. Arnold's 

1 Works, ed. Gosse, 4 vols. London, 1884. 



576 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTUKY LITERATURE bk. ix 

own, and perhaps less alloyed with crotchets and limitations. But it 
is not probable tliat Gray would ever have been a much greater poet 
than he is. For though on one side the shortcomings of his time 
were uncongenial to him, though he could (through •• a plano-convex 
mirror") see and love the country, and appreciate "the Gothick," and 
read Norse and Welsh and Old English, he was still in verse a slave, 
and a willing slave, to a certain classical and literary convention. 
His poems are careful mosaics of previous literary expression; he 
delighted in that feeble personification which is really worse, not 
better, than the older imagery of the Rose ; his diction, though Words- 
worth's attack on it is not quite fair, has a dangerous admixture 
of the cut-and-dried. The "rosy-bosomed Hours," and the "toil- 
ing hand of Care," and " Contemplation's sober eye," jostle tags 
from Virgil and Milton and Shakespeare. Apostrophes meet us every- 
where. When we read the " Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat," 
we say (at least some of us, for from Johnson to the present day there 
have been dissentients) — " That could not have been better done — 
that is done with the grain, in keeping, at ease." When we turn to 
the Eton Ode, fine as it is, there is a sense of buckram in the form, 
of rouge in the colouring. The truth and sincerity of the sentiment, 
the brilliancy and finish of the diction, only make us feel more dis- 
tinctly what is tiol there. 

These characteristics are almost sufficiently shown in the famous 
Elegy, where, beside the fact that Gray adjusts his difficulties and 
harmonises his endeavours better than anywhere else, appears the 
other fact that he is, after all, but a second-rate poet. That the sen- 
timent is commonplace is not against it, but the contrary ; the poet 
is to deal with the commonplace and to make it not common. That 
the phrasing is exquisite cannot be denied ; the soft perfection of 
conventionality, just touched and tinged with the dawn of some- 
thing higher and greater, cannot but appeal to every generous taste. 
Though the quatrain, unless the poet resorts to such devices of 
enjnnibcntoit and linked rhyme as Mr. Swinburne's in Laits Veneris, 
is dangerously subject either to monotony or to an abrupt and jerky 
movement. Gray has vanquished these tendencies. But the expres- 
sion never quite reaches that poignant suggestiveness, that endless 
circling of new and ever new music, which distinguishes the greatest 
poetry. The suggestion is not that which Mr. Arnold has so char- 
itably taken as the key to Gray, that the poet is not "speaking 
out," that there are, behind, treasures of poetry which he keeps in 
reserve ; but that there is nothing more to come, that there ought to 
be .something, and that he is even dimly conscious of both facts. It 
may be that there is no very wide or real demand (though at times 
it is the fashion to affect it) for this " over-soul " in poetry ; and the 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 577 

popularity, immediate, immense, and, it is to be hoped, never likely 
to cease, of tlie Elegy, is no discouraging evidence that there is a 
demand for true poetry of a kind a little lower. But that there is 
this shortcoming in Gray, in the Odes as well as in the Elegy, in the 
few other pieces as well as in the Odes, and that though partly it 
was not wholly or even mainly the fault of his time, there can 
be little doubt. His scholarliness has justly propitiated scholars ; 
his nature, such as it is, has justly charmed the general ; in 
"Spring," in "The Progress of Poesy," in "Vicissitude," even in the 
stagey and mannered " Bard," there are the fine things, the inevi- 
table, the always surprising and new. But they are not very common, 
and they are constantly jumbled up with the tawdry, the artificial, and 
the stale. 

We must now hasten the tale. John Byrom, spmng of a good 
Manchester family, was born in 1692, went to St. Paul's School and 
Trinity • College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow, and cele- 
brated the charms of " Jug," or Joanna, Bentley (a daughter of the 
awful Aristarch, who seems to have charmed all his college), in some 
pretty verses, beginning — 

My time, O ye muses, was happily spent, 

which appeared in the Spectator. Byrom was later a physician, an 
industrious and successful teacher of the first really good system of 
shorthand, a strong Jacobite, and a mystic in religion. His 
works ^ consist of a voluminous and often interesting ^ 
diary, and a large bulk of very various verse, the best Savage, 
known and perhaps the best piece of which is the ^" °' "^' 
famous Jacobite epigram, " God bless the King, of Church and 
State Defender." His practice of throwing every possible subject 
into verse, very often of the swinging trisyllabic kind, of which 
he was a great lover and a very clever practitioner, has not improved 
the poetical merit of his work; but he had much more diffuse poetry 
in him than all but one or two of his contemporaries, and his 
voluminous work, which has had the good fortune to secure two 
admirable editors, is singularly interesting to read, and furnishes 
side-lights on the time only inferior to those of the greatest memoir- 
writers. 

No greater contrast to Byrom can be even imagined than Richard 
Savage (1697-1743), a profligate charlatan, who, partly by the 
accident of being a personal friend of Johnson, and partly by the 

1 Published by the Chatham Society at Manchester in two divisions. Remains 
by R. Parkinson (4 parts or 2 vols. 1854, sq.), and Poems, by A. W. Ward (4 parts 
or 2 vols. 1894, .f(/.) 
2 p 



578 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE hk. ix 

claims he made to being a persecuted " love-child " of persons of 
quality, obtained, and to some extent kept, a reputation quite dispro- 
portionate to his worth. His chief poem, The Wanderer (1729), is a 
rhetorical piece in five cantos, very difficult to follow, in which the 
idea of travel very thinly supports long " screeds " of moral declama- 
tion. Its metre is an attempt at the couplet, rather as Dryden left it 
than as Pope transformed ; its diction is admittedly Thomsonian. 
The Bastard, a year older, more forcible, and more like Dryden, puts, 
with at any rate literary skill. Savage's claim to be Lady Maccles- 
field's son ; and the verses on Lady Tyrconnel's recovery are also in a 
fairly imitative swing of Drydenian flattery. Savage rarely attempted 
lyric, and few of his minor verses of any kind go beyond the merits of 
the exercise. 

David Malloch, who, for reasons rather variously stated, changed 
his name to Mallet, was born about 1702, and, when not much 
past twenty, produced in "William and Margaret" a piece, in 
imitation of the ballad style revealed by Watson's and Ramsay's 
publications {vide infra'), which had great influence. Mallet has 
disputed with Thomson the credit of " Rule Britannia," a piece of 
vigorous declamation and genuine patriotic sentiment, which, how- 
ever, owes more to the merit of its music than to that of its poetry. 
His longer poems. The Excursion and Aniyntor and Theodora, are 
quite open imitations of his friend, as his Verbal Criticism is of Pope. 
"Edwin and Emma," though not so good, was long as famous as 
'• William and Margaret," and all but a few of Mallet's more numerous 
pieces in the lighter style show the grace and wit which belongs to 
the now too-much-neglected lighter verse of the eighteenth century. 
Mallet, who was more of a general man of letters than a poet, died 
in 1765. In his relations with Sarah Marlborough, Bolingbroke, and 
others he showed no very high standard of literary morality and 
dignity ; but it is rather absurd to blame him for writing against 
Byng, whose execution some very good judges have held to be not 
unjust, and distinctly beneficial. 

Conjoined with Mallet in the never executed task of writing a life 
of Marlborough, like him a Thomsonian in style, and like him a 
politician, though a more independent one, was Richard Glover, born 
in 1712, who was all his life connected with business as well as with 
letters, and though for a time unfortunate in his city affairs, died 
prosperous in 1785. The contrast between the vigour of Glover's 
political ballad, " Admiral Hozier's Ghost " and the wastes of his 
stupendous and terrible blank-verse epics, Leonidas and TJie Athenaid, 
containing between them some 20,000 lines, presents in little the 
contrast of the whole poetry of the time. 

Two of the most interesting verse-writers of the middle of the 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 579 

century, both illustrating the peculiarities of the time, were Armstrong 
and Akenside, the first a decided Thomsonian in at least the accidents 
of verse, the other a nondescript, but resembling other nondescripts 
of other times strangely. 

John Armstrong, the less important, was born in Roxburghshire 
in 1709, and educated at Edinburgh, but very shortly went to London, 
where he practised medicine till his death in 1779. Some of his 
early verse is whimsical and a little more, but in 1744 he published 
The Art of Preserving Healthy which did not clash with the ideas of 
the age in poetry, and was quite within them as to jDersonal conduct. 
He was the friend of Wilkes, and also of Smollett, whom he resembled 
in a perfervid temper and in occasional coarseness of literary expres- 
sion. No one now would write on Armstrong's subjects in Arm- 
strong's manner, but his grasp of the peculiar Thomsonian diction 
and versification was extraordinary. 

Mark Akenside was the son of a butcher at Newcastle, where he 
was born in 1721. He was at first intended for the dissenting 
ministry, but his studies at Edinburgh and Leyden drew him to 
physic. His Pleasures of Ijnagination appeared in the 
same year with Armstrong's Art of Preserving Health. 
Akenside was a very strong Whig of the Rei^ublican variety, and 
his principles inspired the brilliant " Epistle to Curio " (Pulteney) 
which, in accordance with an awkward habit of his, he afterwards 
rehandled and spoilt. He practised first at Northampton, then in 
London, having fortified himself with a Cambridge degree ; he 
attained considerable repute in his own profession, though his 
oddities caused him to be pilloried by Smollett as the physician 
who gave the " Roman dinner " at .Paris ; and even Johnson, who 
hated his principles, admits that he might have risen very high 
if he had not died in middle life- (apparently of typhoid) in 
1770. 

Akenside is a very fair touchstone of criticism, ft is impossible 
to like or even to admire him very heartily; he belongs to a class 
of poets, represented in most days, who are plaster rather than marble, 
photograph rather than picture, pinchbeck rather than gold or even 
copper. And yet a reluctant confession must accompany all reason- 
able depreciation of him. It is a question whether Akenside wants 
much to have turned his statue into life, or at least his stucco into 
alabaster. The Pleasures of the Imaginqtion, often and perhaps ex- 
cusably called tepid, constantly quiver or go near to quivering with 
the needed glow ; the " Hymn to the Naiads " has a strange frozen 
grace ; the Odes, at their best, fall not so far short of Collins, and not 
at all short of all but the best of Gray ; and the " Epistle to Curio " 
is a most remarkable study. It has the sincerity, the throb, that 



58o MIDDLE AND LATER iSTH-CENlURY LITERATURE bk. JX 

Pope's satire, except when tinged with personal hate, wants ; it has 
the hurry, the rise, the intense discipline, of the best satiric verse, 
and it only lacks the disengagement, the supremacy, of Dryden. It 
is a pity that Lord Macaulay, in a passage which has probably been 
read by a thousand to one who knows the poem, should have sneered 
at it. For, in truth, almost its only fault is an unpractical devotion to 
principle. It may not be party war; but it is not so very far from 
being magnificent ethically, and it is poetically fine. 

That most interesting and important thing, the Resurrection of 
the Ballad, and indeed of old 23oeti'y generally, was going on during 
the whole, or nearly the whole, of the first half of the century; and 

the effects of it are visible in some of the poets, notably 

of ^he ^Ballad : Mallet and Shenstone, who have been noticed already. 

Percy and J3ut though there may be, as Dryden says, " in epoches 

mistakes," if we endeavour to point them too closely, 
the appearance of Percy's Rcliqiies'^ in 1765 is not likely soon to be 
dethroned from its place of vantage, and we may most conveniently 
here make a halt, a digression, or a parenthesis, in order to mention 
it and its preliminaries. The first of these saw the light (as was per- 
haps natural, seeing that old Scots poetry had died sooner than English) 
in Scotland earlier than in England. At the very time of the Union, 
in 1706, 1708, and 171 1, James Watson, the King's printer, printed 
in Craig's Close, opposite the Cross of Edinburgh, his Choice Col- 
lection^- opening with C/irisfs Kirk oti the Green, and containing 
pieces of Montgomery, Drummond, Ayton, and Sempill, with others 
of various ages and merits. There is no doubt that Watson's venture 
gave the hint to Allan Ramsay, whose Evergreen and Tea-Table 
Aliscellany, ^ on similar principles, but with more individual editing 
and addition, appeared later (1724-40). It is not probable that 
Watson had much direct effect on England, but the " Scotch tunes," 
which had even affected Dryden, have no small influence on two most 
interesting collections which appeared in London before Ramsay's 
own gatherings, Tom D^Uriey's Pills to Purge Melancholy^ (1719) 
and an anonymous assembly (1723) of Old Ballads^ "printed from 
the best and oldest copies." The former was still intended as an 
actual "Warbler" (though hardly a /////^Warbler) for use; the latter 
is professedly a literary collection. 

1 Editions very numerous ; that of H. B. Wheatley, 3 vols. London, 1886, is 
tlie best. Thomas Percy (1729-1801), who died Bishop of Dromoie, a friend of 
Johnson and all the later eighteenth-century wits, and an excellent person, did 
much other literary work, original, editorial, and translating. He adulterated his 
ballads, but he knew no better. 

2 Reprinted, Glasgow, 1869. ^ Reprinted, 4 vols. Glasgow, 1876. 
4 Reprinted, 6 vols. London, n.d. 5 Reprinted, 3 vols. London, n.d. 



THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 581 



D'Urfey,! wlio was old enough to have been among the later and 
lower rivals of Dryden, seems to have had much of the careless 
ringing song-faculty of the elder age. The compiler of the Old 
Ballads is chiefly interesting because of his idea, and because of the 
way in which (as the whole eighteenth century did till near its close) 
he mixes modern pastiches and risky trifles with his old matter. In 
1737 appeared the first volume (there was no second) of The Muses'' 
Library, giving itself out as the work of Mrs. E. Cooper, but attributed 
to the antiquary Oldys. It is not quite what it calls itself, "A general 
Collection of almost all the old valuable poetry extant " — it could hardly 
be that in four hundred small pages of large type. But it contains 
no despicable anthology from Langland to Daniel. In 1760 came 
the remarkable Prolusions of Edward Capell, containing, as formerly 
noticed, not merely the Nitt-browne Maid, but Edward III. and 
Davies's Nosce Teipsiun ; and this was but five years before the Reliques 
themselves, which, planned by Percy and Shenstone, assisted by Lord 
Hailes and others, based upon the Folio MS., and supplemented 
from various sources new and old, give to this day one of the most 
delightful collections of " old valuable poetry " extant, and taught the 
next two generations to write valuable new poetry. I^or in atmosphere, 
subject, and, for good as well as for bad, style need we fear to yoke 
with it Macpherson's Ossian (1760-63), discarding altogether the 
question whether it was faithful translation, ingenious adaptation of 
fragments, or mere and sheer forgery. It gave, just as the ballads 
gave, something different — the necessary twist and alterative to 
the actual course of poetry — and that is enough.-^ 

But we must now take up the direct history. The poetry of 
Johnson is so intimately connected with his other work that it, like 
Goldsmith's, can hardly be noticed separately, but it is of the first 
importance to note that both represent a reaction from the reaction 
— a " neo-classic " halt, if not return. The grotesque odes and the 
pleasing hymns of Watts (1674-1748), the far greater hymns of 
Charles Wesley (1708-88), the safely recorded, if seldom consulted, 

1 He was born about 1650, and died 1723. His production was immense, 
and has never been collected. In 1721 he published four hundred -pages, closely 
printed, of verse under the title New Operas, with Comical Stories and Poems on 
Several Occasions. Here, in the quatrain poem of " Socrates and Timandra," 
is perhaps the most prosaic line in the English language — 

Uncommon ^.wA particularly rare. 
But Tom had merits. 

2 Something more will be found on Ossian inpa. Those who would plunge 
into the vpy^d questions respecting it, may most succinctly consult the old editions 
of the book ils'^lf, with Blair's laudatory dissertation, Macgregor's Genuine Remains 
of Ossian, London, 1841, and Mr. Bailey Saunders's Life of Macpherson, London, 
1894. 



582 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

verses of the minor contributors to Dodsley's Miscellany^ and others 
can but be referred to in passing; but Langhorne and Mickle, men 

not even admitted to the asylum of Mr. Ward's poets, 
Misceulny. "^^^ *°° characteristic of the time not to demand a little 

more notice ; and Smart, Mason, Falconer, Warton, 
Churchill, Beattie, and Chatterton must have individual mention. 

It may be permitted to think that Christopher Smart has been of 
late almost as much overrated as for generations he was ignored. 
The author, whose admitted want of sanity excuses a good deal of 

folly and some moral delinquency, was born in Kent in 
""^"^ ' 1722, and had every chance, his education at Durham 
and Cambridge settling him in a Fellowship at Pembroke College. 
Johnson defended him half-j ocularly, but the piece of Smart's work 
which was least likely to appeal to Johnson is that which has 
secured him his vogue of late years. This is the now famous Song to 
David, to which the praise given to it in Mr. Ward's Poets, and Mr. 
Browning's allotment to the author of a place in the Parleying with 
Certain People of I?nporiance, have given a notoriety certainly not 
attained by the rest of Smart's work, familiar as, for a century or 
so, it ought to have been by its inclusion in Chalmers, where the 
Song is not. Smart, as there presented, is very much like other 
people of his time, giving some decent hackwork, a good deal of 
intentionally serious matter of no value, and a few light pieces of 
distinct merit. 

The Song to David is quite different from all these. It consists 
of some hundred six-line " Romance " stanzas, and was written in a 
lucid or half-lucid interval of its author's madness. The language 
and imagery are largely supplied direct from the Bible. In such a 
case a man can hardly go wrong, unless he lacks scholarship, ear, 
and familiarity with other standards, and Smart lacked none of these. 
The translator of Horace, the fashioner of easy epigrams and Prior- 
like frivolities, was not likely to drop into those distressing absurdities 
which annoy and half-surprise us in Watts, the Wesleys, and even 
Cowper. At the same time, his madness set him free from the mere 
convention of the eighteenth century, and the result is delightful at 
times, intere'sting always. But those who say that "there is nothing 
like it in the eighteenth century" must have temporarily forgotten 
Charles Wesley before, and still more Blake afterwards. It is a" 
hurrying rhapsody of confused images, wonderful beside some 
contemporary work, not so wonderful beside the sources of its own 

iThis (6 vols.), with the continuation of Pearch (4 vols.), fills 10 vols, (the 
edition I use is that of 1775). It holds much of the major as well as of the 
minor verse of the century, and those who wish really to appreciate that verse 
cannot do better than read it through. 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 583 

inspiration. Read it after Tlie Art of Presciviiig Health, and it is 
nearly miraculous ; read it after " Arise, shine, for thy light is come," 
and poetry must for once acknowledge an utter inferiority to 
translated prose. 

William Mason, now chiefly thought of in his connection with 
Gray, lived from 1725 to 1797, was a Cambridge man (it was at Pem- 
broke that he made Gray's acquaintance), and became precentor of 
York. He wrote T/ie English Garden, a blank-verse poem 
published between 1772 and 1782, two tragedies, Elfrida 
(1753) and Caractacus (1759), divers Odes, and not a few smaller 
poems, of which the fustian epitaph on his wife (•' dead Maria ") in 
Bristol Cathedral is best known, and is somewhat redeemed by the 
final quatrain, the work of Gray. All the less good points of that 
poet — his stiffness, his artificial poetic diction, and so forth — are 
exaggerated by Mason ; but he has hardly a touch of Gray's poetry, 
and not many touches of his scholarship. 

William Falconer was an interesting person, and a not quite 
uninteresting poet. He was born in Edinburgh in 1732, the 
son of a barber, went to sea, and is said to have been, about 
the middle of the century, shipwrecked near Cape 

,, , , . . , . - , , Falconer. 

Lolonna, thus acquiring the e.xperience tor the poem that 
gave him fame. Very little seems to be really known about his 
history, but his dedication of The Shipwreck to the Duke of York, in 
1762, brought him a commission in the Navy. He married, did 
some miscellaneous literary work, including a Marine Dictionary, 
which is traditionally well spoken of, and in 1769 was purser of 
the Aurora frigate, which was lost after leaving the Cape, some- 
where in the Indian Ocean. The Shipwreck is one of those 
numerous eighteenth-century poems which, no doubt unconsciously, 
endeavour to escape the tyranny of the couplet-form by taking an 
unconventional subject, as well as by throwing in classical and other 
allusions. 

The brothers Warton, and especially Thomas, the Laureate, 
exhibit, on the contrary, some of the weaknesses, yet very many 
of the gifts and graces of their time. They were sons of a former 
Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who was Professor of 
Poetry and Vicar of Basingstoke. Here they were born, 
Thomas, the more poetical of them, in the year 1728. Joseph, the 
future lieadmaster of Winchester, the editor of Pope, a very good 
critic, under the limitations of his time, and a pleasing versifier, had 
seen the light six years earlier. Thomas went to Trinity College, 
Oxford, before he was sixteen, and practically .spent the rest of his 
life there, dying in 1790. 'He also was Professor of Poetry from 
1757-67, and Poet-Laureate from 17S5 till his death. His 



584 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

really great History of English Poetry^ which few men have been 
competent to discuss, and of which no one competent (unless 
cankered to the core like Ritson) has ever spoken without respect, 
began to appear in 1774. It was exactly what was wanted by the 
age, and its defects are far more than compensated by its merits ; 
while in his Observations on Spenser and other things Warton 
carried further his task of upsetting the notion of the first half of the 
century, that before Dryden English poetry had numbered, at best, some 
intelligent barbarians. His own poetry, though not great, has been 
distinctly undervalued. The Triumph of /sis is one of the very best 
pieces of the School of Pope ; The Progress of Discontent, the very 
best echo in a milder spirit, but with little loss of truth and vigour, of 
the "Omnia Vanitas" of Swift. But he was a rather indolent person 
in a rather indolent age. 

Indolence, in the case of Charles Churchill, was dispersed by 
malignity. This too much forgotten satirist, who made a distinct 
and valuable reaction in the form of the couplet, was the son of the 
rector of Rainham, but born in 1731 in Westminster, 
where his father had preferment. He went to West- 
minster School very early, but enjoyed the benefit of neither 
University, being, it is said, rejected for matriculation at Oxford, 
and though admitted at Trinity, Cambridge, keeping no terms there. 
He obtained orders in 1756; but, as his biographer says, he soon 
" relaxed from the obligations of virtue," and became a self- 
unfrocked priest. He died at the age of thirty-three at Boulogne, 
and the story that his last words were, " What a fool I have been," is 
certainly not invalidated by the denial of his estimable friend John 
Wilkes. His work, almost all done hastily during the last years 
of his life, in the intervals of debauchery and in the spirit of bravado, 
adhering for the most part to a conventional form of satire, and 
animated by a personal spite which is even more worthy of contempt 
than of condemnation, has many grave defects. But the trifling 
subject and the venomous personalities of The Rosciad cannot hide its 
vigour, the occasional acuteness of its criticisms, and above all the 
return, in the management of the couplet, from the exquisite but 
rather shrilling treble of Pope to the manly range of Dryden. And 
the same qualities, with sometimes less, sometimes more, of the same 
defects, appear in The Apology, NigJit, the fierce anti-North-Briton 
Prophecy of Famine, the spiteful but not always unjust Epistle to 
Hogarth, -AXidi. indeed all the couplet poems; while The \_Cock Lane'] 
Ghost, a Hudibrastic poem in four books, though perhaps too much 

1 The edition formerly (p. 39) noted, though the best for instruction, does not 
do the original author justice, as its perpetual additions and corrections, in the 
text itself, make it impossible to appreciate his work. 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 585 

spun out, contains a vast deal of acute, if ill-natured wit. The 
passage here on " Pomposo " (Johnson) is only the best known, 
not by any means the only good, example of that style of acrid 
censorship where the whole is unfair, while by no means all the 
parts are unjust. Churchill's styles and subjects belonged to the 
outskirts of the poetic domain, and he had little nobility of thought. 
But to speak of him as some have spoken is to miss that touch 
of justice with which he himself generally managed to wing his 
lampoons. 

The two poets to be mentioned next present that contrast which 
we have so often found attractive, both showing the influence of their 
time in the most diverse circumstances and on the most diverse 
temperaments and fates. Thomas Chatterton ^ was , 
born at Bristol in November 1752, the son of a school- 
master and cathedral singer, who died before the poet was born. 
The boy was much about the great church of St. Mary Redcliife, took 
to black letter, received some education, was bound to an attorney, 
and in 1764 produced the first of the famous ''Rowley" poems in 
would-be Old English. For nearly si.\ years he endured his life, 
increasing his production as local ignorance and vanity, or his own 
mood, tempted him ; and towards the close of this period he was first 
lured by hopes of patronage from Horace Walpole, and then had his 
hopes dashed. He left for London in the spring of 1770, and made 
some money by literary hackwork of different kinds. But, the demand 
temporarily failing, with no resources, and too proud to beg, he 
poisoned himself in his Holborn lodgings on 24th August, being not 
yet eighteen. 

James Beattie was born in Kincardineshire seventeen years 
before Chatterton, and was educated at the Marischal College of 
Aberdeen, where, after some schoolmastering, he became Professor of 
Moral Philosophy in 1760. He wrote verse, and in 
1770 attacked Hume in an Essay 011 Trnt/i, which gained 
him vast applause, offers of preferment in the Church of England, 
and an allegorical glorification in one of Reynolds's few bad pictures. 
In 1771-74 he published The Minstrel, and later several volumes of 
criticism and discussion, religious and cesthetic. He died in 1802, 
universally and very deservedly respected, for he was a good man 
and a good writer, though not exactly a poet. 

The Rowley poems and Beattie's Minstrel are almost as different 
as the careers and characters of their authors, but they express 
exactly the same influence, the almost desperate determination to 

1 Professor Skeat's otherwise valuable " Aldine " edition unfortunately presents 
a modernised version of the " Rowley " poems : the older ones are therefore to be 
preferred. 



586 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

escape from the conventional present by appealing to the romantic 
past. After a very brief period of controversy as to tlie genuineness of 
Rowley (which even at the time such mere pioneers and dilettanti 
in the study of Old English as Gray and Mason at once negatived), 
this has been entirely given up, and the patient exertions of Professor 
Skeat have shown the originals, the processes, and the entire 
machinery in the invention of the dialect. But it may be permitted 
to protest against the printing of the poems as a whole in modernised 
form, and still more against the extraordinary liberties which others 
have taken with Chatterton's text, even to the Bentleian extent of 
substituting words which to the individual critic "seem more 
appropriate." It is certain that if we wish to appreciate Chatterton's 
actual poetic powers, we must take the words he wrote in the spelling 
in which he wrote them ; though linguistic inquiry may take its own 
course. Thus considering, we shall find him a distinct puzzle, show- 
ing in his ordinary English nothing of the charm which floats about 
his Rowleian dialect-pieces, and even in these not perhaps suggesting 
the certain possession of that charm had he lived. His metrical 
ability is great, though it is rather too much to claim for him that 
he fully anticipated Coleridge's reversion to the Genesis and Exodus 
scheme, and his phrase and word-music have now and then a singular 
romantic appeal. But there is something disquieting in this, since it 
exactly resembles the not infrequent, but always passing, gifts of very 
young children ; and it makes him aesthetically a deliglit, but critically 
a problem. His antiques vary from pastiches, hardly more really 
antique than Thomson or Shenstone, though inspired by the study of 
somewhat older models, to things almost or wholly exquisite, like 
" /Ella's Dirge." The nature-touches are in the same way sometimes 
exquisite, sometimes conventional, and the whole is a strange medley 
of promise, performance, and failure. 

There is, on the other hand, no puzzle about Beattie. He repre- 
sents, with a quite marvellous and rather terrible sufficiency, the 
rather more than averagely gifted, and much more than averagely 
cultivated, man, who, coming to years of literary discretion at a 
critical time, feels its (in this case. Romantic) impulse with all his will, 
and carries it out to the best of his might. Unfortunately, that 
might was very small ; Seattle's early verses are simply echoes of 
Collins and Gray, his translations are unimportant, and his couplet- 
protest against the erection of a monument to Churcliill fails to make 
up in vigour for what it wants in generosity. Nay, The Minstrel or 
The Progress of Genius can satisfy only the most moderate expecta- 
tions, or the least fastidious taste. There is absolutely no story; the 
expression is seldom or never striking, and the versification (it is 
Spenserian), though not contemptible, has no distinction. But all 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 587 

the objects of the early, confused, Romantic appetite — country scenes, 
woods, ruins, the moon, chivalry, mountains — are dwelt upon with a 
generous emotion, and with at least poetic intention. Above all, 
Beattie was important " for the/n,'''' to apply once more one of the 
most constantly applicable of critical dicta. His time could under- 
stand him, as it could not have understood purer Romanticism, and it 
is probable that, for an entire generation at least, and perhaps longer. 
The Afms^rel served to bring sometimes near, and sometimes quite, to 
poetry, readers who would have found Coleridge too fragmentary, 
Shelley too ethereal, and both too remote. 

Yet another pair may be noticed briefly before turning to the 
gre^t quartette of Burns, Blake, Cowper, and Crabbe, which appeared 
before the death of Johnson, and the last feeble growth which pre- 
luded the 7-eveillc of the Lyrical Ballads. These speci- 
mens of a great host shall be Langhorne and Mickle. ^Micki"!'^" 
John Langhorne was born at Kirkby Stephen in 1735, 
and educated at Appleby. He never went to either University, though 
he was entered at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and his time passed chiefly 
in tutorships and schoolmasterships. He married twice ; did a good 
deal of literary work, which included the well-known translation of 
Plutarch (with his brother William) ; had fair clerical preferment, 
and died in 1779. William Julius Mickle was born at Langholm on 
the Scottish side of the Border in 1734, was educated at Edinburgh, 
was unfortunate in business, went to London at the age of thirty 
to engage in literature, and died there in 1788, after also doing 
varied work, the best known and most successful being his translation 
of The Liisiad, which, like Langhorne's Plutarch, does not greatly 
concern us. 

But these men are excellent specimens of not excellent poets. 
Mickle's ^ songs and ballads, such as " There's nae luck about the 
house," in Scots, and the pretty " Cumnor Hall " in English ; 
Langhorne's topographical work, such as " Studley Park," and his 
remarkable anticipation of Crabbe in "The Country Justice," are 
something more than straws. They are unmistakable vanes, showing 
in what directions the poetical wind was blowing. And Langhorne 
at least sometimes has a melancholy clangour of verse too rare in his 
century. 

1 Mickle had veiy much to do with the first edition of Evans's Old Ballads 
(2 vols. 1777, and 2 more, 1784), a designed supplement to Percy, and, like the 
Reliqiies, consisting of an odd mixture of genuine old stuff, the same altered, 
modern pastiches, ballad and Ossianic, etc. The second edition of this, in 
1810 (4 vols.), is a historical document of a striking kind, the editor and pub- 
lisher, Evans's son, showing the further drift of the time by ruthlessly turning 
out most of the pastiches, correcting the old work from originals, and adding 
more. 



588 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTII-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

Of the greater four, William Cowper ^ was by far the eldest, indeed 
the unfortunate circumstances of his life threw his composition almost 
a generation behindhand. He was born in 1731 at Great 
Berkhamstead, where his father was rector. The family 
had already attained great legal distinction, and the poet's mother 
was a Miss Donne, of the house of the great Dean of St. Paul's. 
Cowper was educated at Westminster, where, notwithstanding the 
black account of public schools given later in Tirociniutn, he made 
many friends, as he also did in his subsequent study of both 
branches of the law. He wrote for the fashionable periodical of the 
Co/nwisseiir, and seemed likely to be happy and (for his family 
interest was great) prosperous. But the seeds of madness in him were 
developed by the crossing of his love for his cousin Theodora, by the 
nervous excitement of his appointment to certain clerkships in the 
House of Lords, and by religious stimulus. The form which his 
mania took (1763) was suicidal, and though, after proper treatment, 
he recovered, his prospects were irrecoverably blighted. Removing 
into the country with a small allowance, he lived first at Huntingdon, 
and then at Olney, in friendsliip with the famous Evangelical 
clergyman John Newton, and with the family of the Unwins. After 
about fifteen years (during which he had at least one return of mania, 
or at best melancholy) he began to write, first hymns with Newton, 
and then miscellaneous poetry. For rather more than ten years he 
was happy, sane, and (for a part of them) a good deal in love with a 
widow, named Lady Austin. His first poems. Truth, Error, etc., 
appeared in 1782, The Task in 1785, his Homer a little later. He 
should have died now ; but, unluckily for him, he survived for yet 
another decade of misery, through mental and bodily illness, dying at 
East Dereham in 1800, in the frame of mind expressed by his last 
and perhaps his greatest poem, the wonderful Castaway, where the 
poetry of utter despair is expressed, albeit with the utmost simplicity, 
yet in a fashion which makes mere Byronism of Leopardi and the 
second James Thomson. 

Cowper's ten or twelve years' work, even excluding his translation 
of Homer and other things, is by no means inconsiderable, and its 
range is almost as remarkable as its bulk. His letters are among 
the very best in English, perfectly unaffected and natural, and yet as 
accomplished literature as if they had been written for publication. 
His verse, in all but its very best things, requires more allowance and 
historical adjustment. The famous John Gilpin among the lighter 
things, like The Castaway and Boadicea among the more serious, need 
neither ; they stand by themselves, and will always obtain admission 

1 The standard edition of Cowper's whole Works is Southey's; Mr. Benham's 
" Globe " edition of the Poems is excellent. 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 589 

for their author into the courts of the greater poetry, wherever the 
critical doorkeepers are not hopelessly incompetent and prejudiced. 
But elsewhere Cowper exhibits not merely some defects due to his 
liapless fate, but more due to his time. He was a student of 
nature, a practitioner of easy and conventional forms of verse, and a 
writer of the simplest and most graceful English. But he was born 
when Pope had not yet written some of his most characteristic work, 
the sane years of his early manhood were passed while Johnson was 
obtaining his dictatorship, and when he began to write in earnest 
that dictatorship was in full force. Accordingly, we find in him the 
oddest mixture of old and new, — couplet-writing, not indeed of the 
strictest Popian school (for he had improved on Churchill, and gone 
back to enjaj/ibe/zietit), but still cramped and artificial ; blank verse, not 
quite copied from any one, but too often stiff and deformed by the 
poetic diction which, violently as he attacked it, survives even in 
Wordsworth. Yet we find, side by side with these, and sometimes 
actually couched in them, the most faithful and exquisite studies of 
nature — culminating at least once in the full reflex meditation, the 
sense of man's identity with nature, that appears in Yardley Oak 
(1791) — a gentle humour totally free from the hardness and from the 
license which too frequently deface the otherwise excellent fun of the 
eighteenth century, and, though few touches of passion, yet some, such 
as the famous — 

I was a stricken deer that left the herd — 

thrilling with the same intensity which afterwards gathered force and 
gloom in the final crash of Tlie Castaway. 

Such a poet is sure to occupy a peculiar position both in his life- 
time and subsequently. In the last ten or twenty years of the 
eighteenth, and the first ten or twenty of the nineteenth, Cowper, of 
no great power with the critics, was an immense influence with 
readers. He had just as much Romanticism as they were fit for, and 
though it is an absurdity to represent him as in any way revolu- 
tionary, his work contained the seeds, and showed the symptoms, 
of impending revolution. He is the direct intermediary between 
Thomson and Wordsworth, and the contrast between him and Gold- 
smith (see next chapter), who was almost within a year or two his 
contemporary, exhibits the whole difference between the dominant 
but waning, and the insurgent but soon to be triumphant, poetical 
instincts of the time. Regarded from a more formal point of view, 
Cowper's poetry inclines rather to the old than to the new. He is a 
very easv, as he was a very careful, writer, but the many-centred and 
varying measures and melodies of the coming age were not for him. 
He had not, as his twenty years' junior Chatterton had, come to any 



S90 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

knowledge of the Christabel metre ; his trisyllables by themselves, 
as in the well-known "The rose it was washed," show no advance 
upon Shenstone's in resonance and fluidity ; the noble trochees of 
Boadicea, and the still nobler iambs of The Castaway, have the 
simple movement of his own time, not, like Blake's, the complicated 
throb of later measures. Intellectually, Cowper is rendered more 
difficult in appearance, perhaps, than in reality by his malady. He 
would probably not have been very different as a perfectly sane man ; 
that is to say, he would have at least shown generous sympathies, 
pure morality, and, above all things, the instincts and conduct of a 
gentleman, in the very best sense of the word, without joining to 
them any very vigorous reasoning power or wide faculty of apprecia- 
tion. His nature, slightly feminine, must always have been more 
than slightly prejudiced ; but his prejudices sometimes contribute to 
his poetry, and rarely interfere with it. 

Crabbe, the nearest to Cowper of the other three in form, and on 

some sides (not all), of taste, was many years his junior, being born 

in 1754, and did not die till more than as many after him in 1832. 

But accident of a less ghastly kind interposed nearly the 

Crabbe. , , • u- ?. i .• u u 

same odd gap m his literary production. He was born 
at the Suffolk Aldborough, now often spelt Aldeburgh, in 1754, his 
father having been first a schoolmaster, then an exciseman ; was 
educated as a surgeon, and practised a little, but went to London to 
seek his fortune in literature, and obtained, when at the last extremity, 
the patronage of -Burke and Thurlow. His first poem, 'J7ie Library, 
appeared in 1782, his second, T/ie Village, was revised by Johnson. 
He took orders, received preferment, and married a girl of station 
superior to his own. to whom he had long been attached. The News- 
paper appeared in 1785. For twenty years he published nothing. 
But he began again in 1807 with The Parish Register, followed it in 
1 810 with his greatest book. The Borough, and later gave Tales in 
Verse and Tales of the Hall. During his last years Crabbe was 
treated with much honour and no jealousy by the younger and greater 
poets of the Romantic school, always had a considerable public, 
and enjoyed his reputation to the full — the early moodiness and 
restiveness which were probably due, in part at least, to the trials of 
his youth, softening to an easy bo)iho)nie, which sometimes approached 
the childish, in his age. 

However, temperament, or suffering, or what not, impressed upon 
most of his work,i and upon all the best parts of it, a character not 
at all childish. Crabbe tried several poetic ways ; some of his early 
works, such as TJie Library and The Newspaper, being little more 

1 Works, first (1840-41) in 8 vols, with his son's Life, then in i (London, n.d!) 
There is said to be a good deal unpublished. 



CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 591 

than a continuation of the verse-description of Garth and Armstrong 
and Falconer. But he settled, in The Village, and in all his later 
works, into a very peculiar kind of " criticism of life," anticipated, as 
has been said, very slightly by Langhorne, but in the main original. 
Crabbe could see nature, and describes it — especially those aspects 
which may be symbolically classed as autumnal, the aspects suggest- 
ing failure, decay, disappointment — with astonishing truth; but he 
was still of his century in the fact that he preferred characters to 
scenes, and chiefly set the latter as frames to the former. And here, 
too, grimness prevails. Not only in the famous story of the tyrant, 
Peter Grimes, but in such milder tragedies as " The Natural Death 
of Love," and the enforced constancy of the repenting lover in 
" Delay has Danger," Crabbe always seems to incline to the sterner 
side, to a quiet and undemonstrative pessimism. In style and form 
he is a curious mixture. He early struck into, and always kept, a 
fashion of couplet-writing, which was sometimes almost intolerably 
pedestrian ; but he could diversify it, when he rose to the class of 
gloomy subject just referred to, with lines, and indeed long passages, 
of astonishing vigour. On the whole, Crabbe is the least poetical of 
all the writers who can be called in any way as good poets as him- 
self, and he is seldom poetical at all except when he is a pessimist. 
The browner shadows seem to inspire him as sunshine does others. 
But he was invaluable to his generation, and can never lose value to 
others, first as a painter of nature, and then as one of manners and 
character. In externals he innovated hardly at all; in essentials he 
is as far from Goldsmith or from Pope as Wordsworth himself. 

The third Englishman of the trio stands far apart both from 
Cowper and Crabbe. William Blake ^ is one of the eccentrics of 
poetry ; it was never his chief business, which was that of a painter, 
or his chief hobby, which was that of a seer. He pro- 
duced (or in the first case had produced for him, for he 
seems to have taken very little trouble about it) three very small 
volumes of verse — the Poetical Sketches of 1783, the Songs of In- 
nocence in 1789, and the Songs of Experience in 1794, the two last 
being not in any sense published, and hardly in any sense printed at 
all, being worked, text and designs alike, from copper plates, and 
coloured by hand. To these indeed may be added, if the extension 
of the term poetry be tolerated, a great mass of so-called "prophetic" 
work, rhapsodies bearing much resemblance to Ossian in style, and 
containing the exposition of a visionary theosophy. Blake was a 
Londoner for the whole of his life, with the rarest and briefest 

1 Complete Works, ed. Ellis and Yeats, 3 vols. London, 1893. The "Aldine" 
edition of the Poems, ed. W. M. Rossetti, London, 1874, is not quite complete. 
Gilchrist's Life, 2nd ed. 2 vols. London, 1880, is almost indispensable. 



592 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

intervals; he was born in 1757, and died in 1828. He married early 
a jewel of a wife, Catherine Boucher, and he supported himself partly 
by engraving, partly by selling his original compositions to a few 
private customers. His character, though morally stainless, was 
extremely odd ; and it would be extremely difficult to frame any 
definition of complete sanity which would take him in. The greater 
part of his prophetic work is a mere curiosity, and his critical opinions 
in art and literature, if sometimes almost inspired, are one-sided and 
prejudiced to a degree sometimes almost ludicrous. Nor is his touch 
in poetry any surer than his hand in painting. But in both vocations, 
and perhaps especially in that of the poet, he gives flashes, and some- 
times more than flashes, of genius, which excel anything to be found 
in the work of his time. There are at least half a dozen things in 
the Poetical Sketches which no contemporary, who had advanced 
beyond the nursery or at best the schoolroom, could have written; 
while, both here and in the later Songs, there are pieces which, for a 
certain combination of extreme simplicity with unearthly music, no 
contemporary nor any follower, except Thomas Beddoes, was to equal. 
In all points of art, both pictorial and poetic, Blake was an extreme, 
indeed an extravagant. Romantic — that is to say, he set convention 
utterly at naught, despised and refused rules and models, and aimed, 
first of all, at the vao;ue suggestion, as he would have said, of truth, 
as we may put it, of beauty. The presence in both of familiarity with 
Biblical images and phrase, and perhaps the presence also of madness 
in both, make a certain superficial resemblance between Blake and 
Christopher Smart, but it is mainly superficial. Blake really belongs 
to, and is almost, if not quite, the chief of, that small but very precious 
band of poets who are even more under the influence of Queen Mab 
than under that of the Muses. He is elf-ridden, but his tyrants have 
more than compensated him for the tricks they play, by touching his 
lips with the gift of elfin music. 

The fourth, Robert Burns,i to a gift of poetry at its best hardly 
inferior to Blake's, and far fuller, as well as more various, consistent, 
intense, and human, added the possession of a certain national and 
inherited capital and faculty which makes him one of 
the most interesting figures in literary history. He was 
born in the " blast o' Janwar win'," from which he drew unpleasant 
omens, at the beginning of 1759, and his father was a very small 
farmer, of extraction rather more northern than the part of Scotland 
(the Kyle district of Ayrshire) which saw his son's birth. Robert 
was fairly educated, and though kept to the plough-tail, early developed 

1 Editions, selections, criticisms, and biographies innumerable. For this very 
reason perhaps, in the case of no poet is the bare text (witli glossary, if necessary) 
more to be preferred, by the beginner at any rate. 



CHAi'. i THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 593 

his two great inclinations, for love and for literature. But he was 
twenty-seven before he published, in 1786, at Kilmarnock, his first 
volume of poems, and, had it been only a little less successful, he 
had intended to expatriate himself. The book, however, brought 
him some money and a great deal of fame ; and a winter of welcome 
in Edinburgh sent him back to marry Jean Armour, the most per- 
manent of his many loves, to settle at Ellisland, in Dumfriesshire, on 
a small farm, and to combine it with a post in the excise, which 
latterly formed his main support. Burns, though a good deal too 
much stir has been made about his delinquencies (which in one 
direction were those of almost all classes in his time, and in another 
were of the class of which a poet is tempted to convey an exagger- 
ated idea to his readers), was a wiser man in theory than in conduct, 
and the political and ecclesiastical, no less than the social, accidents 
of his time and country contributed to his mistakes and misfortunes 
in life. He died in July 1796, broken in health and fortune, but 
with a reputation absolutely safe as far as literature is concerned, 
and exercising an influence the greatness of which was hardly recog- 
nised even by those who felt it most. 

In estimating both the positive and the historical importance of 
Burns as a poet, we must keep these carefully apart from his 
position as a national favourite. It is certainly no small thing to 
have thus given literary expression and form to the most cherished 
tastes and feelings of a whole people. Yet this touches the accidents, 
rather than the essentials, of poetry and of literature generally, and 
does not affect either his positive excellence or his unique historical 
value. This latter depends upon the fact that he came just at the 
time when the constantly tightening bonds between Scotland and 
England were to some extent obliterating the distinctive Scottish 
characteristics, and when oral ballad literature was being killed in 
order that it might be preserved to us by the press. 

As we have seen, Scottish poetry during the eighteenth century 
had had a very important effect on English indirectly and by stimu- 
lation ; but the actual offspring of the Scottish muse, since Allan 
Ramsay (i 686-1 758) consoled her long widowhood, had 
been rather interesting than important. This is espe- scn-s'from^ 
cially the case with Ramsay's own original work. The ^^"^say to 
famous Gentle Shepherd (1725), a pastoral "by person- 
ages," in the Old French phrase, rather than a drama, contains some 
charming description and some pleasant painting of manners, but is 
not strong, while most of his other work is distinctly weak. But he 
had some share, and not a few followers — Hamilton of Bangour 
(1704-54), Alexander Ross (1698-1784), John Skinner (1721-1807), 
Isabel Pagan (1740-1821), "Lady Anne Barnard (1750-1825) — had 

2 Q 



594 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTII-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 



much more — of the strange, not easily analysed, and hardly at all 
literary, gift of folk-song, which it is perhaps academic to try to dis- 
tinguish rigidly from poetry. We are scarcely able — and perhaps 
we do not greatly care — to set down the exact debt of such things as 
Lady Anne's " Auld Robin Gray " and Isabel Pagan's " Ca' the 
yowes to the knowes" to the exquisite plaintive notes from which they 
can never be divided in memory. But the efficacy of such things in 
keeping alive a sense of the poetic " over-soul " cannot be exaggerated. 
Robert Fergusson (1750-74), Michael Bruce (1746-67), and John 
Logan (1748-88) approach literature nearer, but at the forfeit of 
poetry. The first wrote partly in dialect, was adopted by Burns as 
his master, and has been a good deal over-praised, though he has no 
small merit, especially in some Edinburgh pieces and in "The Gowd- 
spink " (goldfinch). Another bird, the Cuckoo, acted up to its repu- 
tation by inspiring a good, though not consummate, copy of verses, 
which has been challenged by the champions of Bruce and Logan 
for both those writers. In such a quarrel, espiecially as the author- 
ship is of infinitesimal importance, no wise man takes a side. Bruce 
died young, and certainly wrote some pleasing verse ; Logan, his 
friend, literary executor, and (as one theory holds) supplanter, died 
in early middle age, and seems to have had rather more talent than 
conduct. But all the poets of the paragraph must rest their main 
claim to historic interest on the fact that they exemplify, and that 
they handed on, the vague poetic inspiration which was to take 
definite form in Burns. 

This he caught up, and with an intense and sovereign poetical 
power, fixed, without killing, all the floating folk-poetry of Scotland, 
effecting this to no small extent by the felicitous audacity (to which a 
writer of more academic cultivation could hardly have attained) of 
actually keeping much of the old, while he purged what he kept of 
dross, and added new gold of his own. 

Burns was a prose-writer as well as a poet, and took much pains 

with his prose letters. But, though clever, they are distinctly artificial, 

and their biographical value far exceeds their value as literature. 

This is also, though not so universally, the case with 

quality."^ those of his poems which were written in literary Eng- 
lish. He had not proved this medium, and though 
notliing that he wrote could well be quite valueless, he has, when he 
has gotten to his English, not much more value than belongs to the 
usual eigliteenth-century poet of the better class. In fact, here as 
elsewhere, he resembles Chatterton. With his poems in Scots the 
case is entirely different. Here he did not merely bring to bear the 
inherited attention to, and familiarity with, nature, which has been 
noted throughout as characteristic of Scottish poetry ; indeed, though 



CHAP. I THE FOETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 595 

he is strong in tliis, it is not his strongest point. What he brought 
was first of all the accumulated virtue of Scots verse and phrase, so 
different from English, and therefore so invaluable as an alterative ; 
and secondly his own special poetic gift. 

Even the mere fact that his favourite metres (especially the 
popular form which, coming directly, and by something of an excep- 
tion, from a Provenyal original, established itself for good in Scots 
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) were constantly different 
from anything usual in English, must be allowed its importance. 
The dialect, so rich in quaint special words, that of themselves 
break through and transform the hackneyed generalities of eighteenth- 
century diction ; the sharply-observed and faithfully transcribed 
customs and characters; the peculiar imagery, — all these must be 
counted in to understand the charm and the value of The Tiva 
Dogs and The Twa Herds, of The Brigs of Ayr and Death and Dr. 
Hornbook, of The Cotter^s Saturday Night and The Jolly Beggars, as 
well as of the innumerable scraps of song which, more than anything 
else, have earned Burns his immortality. 

But there is much in the poetry of Burns besides dialect and 
local colour, fresh versification, and special scenery, and though 
this much is of the indefinable kind, of the kind that escapes all 
analysis, one thing about it can be said with confidence, that it was 
essentially lyrical, and another, that lyric was what was chiefly needed 
to melt the eighteenth-century frost. From the death or silence of the 
last Cavalier singers about a hundred years earlier, there had been in 
English no serious lyric of an impassioned kind that possessed the 
highest qualities of music in verse, there had not even been any 
approach to such verse. But it not only existed in Burns ; it was 
almost impossible for him to open his mouth, to dip pen in ink, 
without producing it. He had positively to constrain bin- self, to 
keep his eyes fixed on some false model, to cramp and force his 
voice into alien speech, before he could become prosaic, or even 
produce the kinds of poetry that are nearest to prose. They do him 
a great wrong and make a great mistake, who dwell upon his politics, 
his philosoph}', or anything but his poetry. As a matter of fact. Burns 
felt and saw too much to have much time for thinking, even if he had 
been educated^ that way. And very fortunate this is. The time did 
not want thought ; it wanted nature and song, and he gave it both. 

Excep' for these four great writers, the poetical production of the 
last two decades of the century, till the Lyrical Ballads themselves, Avas 
all but of the lowest order. The handful of sonnets, meditative and topo- 
graphical, published by William Bowles ^ in 1789, had extraordinary 

1 Bowles (1762-1850) published much verse later, but nothing of importance. 
His edition (and depreciation) of Pope had some. 



596 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

influence on Coleridge and on other poets, and show very strongly 
the nisiis, the still inorganic eflfort of the age towards local colour, 
the "proper word," the linking of nature-aspect to human feeling, 
and other characteristics of Romanticism. The unrhymed Pindarics 
of Sayers, not in themselves very good things, though they produced 
good work by the hands of his followers, Southey and Shelley, showed 
in the same way the revolt against the smooth tyranny of the rhymed 
couplet, the craving for something different, which shows itself at the 
beginning of each new poetic age. But the main bulk of the verse 
of the time, which has not passed utterly out of even historic 
memory, consists of satiric work. To this class belong the clever 
lampoons ^ of the Rolliad, directed against the younger Pitt, the more 
varied and bulky, but even less poetic, work of " Peter Pindar," and, 
above all, the triumphant, and, as literature if not exactly as poetry, 
wholly admirable, parodies and diatribes of the A7iti-Jacobin, the chief 
contributors to which were Canning, Ellis, and Frere, while it was 
edited by William Gifford (i 756-1 826), a rough critic and a jejune 
versifier, but the author earlier of two extremely clever satires, the 
Baviad and Mcsviad, and the editor later of some of the great 
dramatists and of the (Ijiarterly Review. 

1 But for the tyranny of space a chapter might be occupied, with pleasure at 
least to the writer, by the lighter verse of this century. As noted more than once, 
more than one poet, mediocre in serious work, has left charming light things. Of 
those who are light or nothing, the chief are Isaac Hawkins Browne (1706-60), 
whose Pipe of Tobacco (1736) is a delightful string of parodies on the chief poets of 
the day; Christopher Anstey (1724-1805), who in The Nero Bath Guide (1766) 
took the anapaestic tetrameter from Prior, gave it a new tune, and established it for 
a century and a half to come as the best vehicle for certain purposes; Sir Charles 
Hanbury Williams (1709-59), a coarse lampooner, whose poems, not published 
till 1822, have been rather overrated for wit and style; and Sterne's disreputable 
friend John Hall Stevenson (1718-85), whose Crazy Tales, etc., are as coarse as 
Williams's but much cleverer, and who could see, as his description of the Scotch 
fir on the Cleveland moors — 

That waves its arms and makes a stir, 
And tosses its fantastic head — 

shows sufficiently. Of the persons named above, " Peter Pindar " was John Wol- 
cot (1738-1819), who professed both physic and divinity, and during the last 
twenty years of the century lampooned George III., the new Royal Academy, 
Tory ministers, and things and persons generally. George Ellis (1753-1815) gave 
his talent in satirical verse first to the Whigs in the Rolliad, then to the Tories in 
the Anti-jlacobin, but did his best service to literature in the Specimens of poetry, 
and romance, referred to earlier. Canning (1770-1827) belongs primarily to his- 
tory. John Hookham Frere (1760-1846) was a man of very great talent, chiefly 
spent on translations, " skits," and the remarkable burlesque romance (variously 
referred to as " Whistlecraft," from the iioin de guerre assumed, " The Monks 
and the Giants," etc.) on King Arthur and the Round Table, which gave Byron 
the metre and style of Beppo and Don Juan, and is not exceeded by either in spirit 
and art. 



V 



THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE co? N 



597 



In serious poetry the standard names — names, alas! standing 
rather as marks for scorn than as objects of veneration — are those of 
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) and VVilham Hayley (1745-1820), the 
former, in his Botanic Garden (1789-92), the last and one of the most 
polished, but also one of the most frigid and unpoetic, of the descriptive 
couplet-writers, the latter a respectable and amiable dilettante, who 
wrote bombastic or namby-pamby verse with a fatal facility. Below 
them, if indeed in these regions of poetry higher and lower are 
predicable terms, we come to degrees of dulness or absurdity, ending 
in the so-called " Delia Cruscans." who were the object of Gifford's 
scorn, a group of versiliers at the head of whom was Robert Merry 
(1755-98), a man of good education and some parts, whose exploits 
in poetastry show better perhaps than anything else the poetical 
degradation, or rather exhaustion, of the time. 



CHAPTER II 

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 

Richardson — Fielding — Smollett — Sterne — Minor novelists — Walpole — 
Beckford — • Mrs. Radcliffe— Lewis 

Some reference has been made earlier to the differences, or rather 
the -hesitations, of opinion in reference to the exact history of the 
English novel.^ But for general purposes these may be neglected. 
The early prose romance, the Euphuist innovation, major and minor, 
the philosophical or Utopian fantasy, the brief Elizabethan tale, the 
long-winded translations or imitations of the Scud(fry Heroic stor)^, 
the picaresque miscellany, and the like, are stages obvious as the 
general history unfolds itself. As to the exact position which the 
great names of Bunyan and of Defoe hold, difference may be agreed 
to with resignation. What is certain is that about the beginning of 
the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the period immediately 
succeeding the appearance of Defoe's work, there began a develop- 
ment of the prose novel, and that this, partly though by no means 
wholly owing to one group of great writers in the style, had made 
very great progress by the beginning of the third, about which time 
we find Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy receiving boxes full of 
new novels from her daughter in England. 

It is so difficult to mark out the precise stages by which the modern 
novel came into being, that the wisest critics have abstained from 
attempting it. We can only say that, for the nearly three genera- 
tions which passed between the Restoration and the publication 
of Richardson's Pamela, there was an ever greater determination 
and concentration towards completed prose fiction ; and that the 
use of the general form in two such different ways by two such 
diff'erent men as Swift and Defoe is sufficient proof how near, by the 
end of the second decade or so, that completed fonn was. But 

1 This history has been put briefly, but with much knowledge and grace, in 
Mr. W. A. Raleigh's The English Novel (London, 1894). 

598 



CHAP, II TilE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 599 

there was not much general practice of it.^ Mrs. Manlc}- and Mrs. 
Haywood, women of no very good reputation, followed in the 
footsteps of Afrj, Behn, and achieved a certain popularity, but the 
novels of the former are thinly-veiled political libels. The earlier 
books of Mrs. Haywood are in seventeenth-century styles, and though 
she lived to do better in Betsy Thoughtless (1751) 2i\\d Jem/ny and 
Jenny Jessatny (1753), these were not published till long after the 
three great re-creators of the novel had shown the way. To them, 
therefore, we may as well turn at once. 

Samuel Richardson, by a great deal the. oldest, by a little the pre- 
cursor in actual publication, and iudirectly the inspirer of his greatest 
and nearest successor, was born in 1689 '^ Derbyshire, his father being 
a joiner, his mother of rather higher rank. He went to 
Charterhouse, and was apprenticed in 1706 to a printer, 
whose daughter he afterwards married. After setting up for himself 
he became very prosperous, had a house in Salisbury Court, Fleet 
Street, and another, tirst at North End, then at Parson's Green, was 
Master of the Stationers' Company in 1754, and King's Printer in 
1 76 1. A year later he died of apoplexy. He was contented for 
many years to print books without writing them, and he was past fifty 
when a commission or suggestion from two well-known London pub- 
lishers, Rivington and Osborne, for a sort of Model Letter-writer (he 
had in his youth practised as an amateur in this art) led to the com- 
position of Pamela, which (at least the first part of it) was published 
in 1740, and became very popular. Richardson had already made 
some acquaintance with persons of a station superior to his own, and 
the fame of his book enlarged this, while it also tempted him to fly 
higher. In 1748 he produced Clarissa, which is usually considered" 
his masterpiece, and in 1753 Sir Charles Grandison. Except one 
paper in The Adventurer, he published nothing else, but left an 
enormous mass of correspondence. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 
gives the history of a girl of low degree who, resisting temptation, 
marries her master, and in the second and less good part reclaims 
him from irregular courses ; Clarissa, that of a young lady of family 
and fortune, who, partly by imprudence, partly by misfortune, falls 
a prey to the arts of the libertine Lovelace and, resisting his 
olfers of marriage, dies of a broken heart, to be revenged in a 
duel by her cousin ; Sir Charles Grandison, that of a young man of 
still higher family and larger fortune, who is almost faultless, and 

iThe minor novels of the eighteenth century are not generally accessible save 
in the original editions. There is, indeed, one useful and rather full collection, 
Harri sou's Novelists, but, as a whole, it is very bulky, and duplicates much that 
every one has on his shelves in other forms. Richardson has been sometimes. 
Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Miss Burney have been often, reprinted. 



6oo MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

constantly successful in all his endeavours, and who, after being the 
object of the adoration of two beautiful girls, the ItaHan Clementina 
della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron, condescends to make 
the latter happy. Richardson's expressed, and beyond the slightest 
doubt his sincere, purpose in all was, not to produce works of art, but 
to enforce lessons of morality. Yet posterity, while pronouncing his 
morals somewhat musty and even at times a little rancid, has recog- 
nised him as a great, though by no means an impeccable, artist. It 
is noteworthy that his popularity was as great abroad as at home — 
indeed, it far exceeded that which any English writer, except Scott and 
Byron, has obtained on the Continent during his lifetime. His adop- 
tion of the letter-form infiuenced novelists very powerfully, and though 
his style and spirit were less imitable, there is no doubt that they 
practically founded the novel of analysis and feeling, as distinguished 
from the romance of adventure. 

His faults are an excessive long-windedness {Clarissa and Sir 
Charles Grandison are by far the longest novels of great merit in 
English, if not in any language), an inability, which grew upon him, 
to construct a story with any diversified and constaatlv liA^' interest, 
an almost total lack of humour, and a teasing and ni£ticu5ous minute- 
ness of sentimental analysis, and history of motive and mood. To 
these Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a formidable critic, added, justly 
enough, though not so importantly from our point of view as from 
hers, an ignorance of the society which, in his two later novels, he 
endeavours to depict. His merits, on the other hand, are a faculty 
of vivid, though too elaborate, presentation of the outward acces- 
sories of his scenes ; a real, though somewhat limp, grasp of conversa- 
tion ; an intense, though not very varied or extensive, mastery of 
pathos ; and, above all, a one-sided, partial, but intimate and tme, 
knowledge of human motive, sentiment, and even conduct, his time 
being considered. The proviso is necessary; and the overlooking 
of it (with perhaps some personal reasons) was at the bottom of 
Johnson's now almost incomprehensible preference of Richardson 
over Fielding. Richardson knew the feminine character of his time 
with a quite extraordinary thoroughness and accuracy, though his 
men are much less good ; whereas Fielding knew both men and 
women first, eighteentli-century men and women only afterwards, 
and, however well, in a minor degree. Nor, though Johnson had 
plenty of humour himself, was he likely to resent the absence of it 
in Richardson, as he resented the presence of a kind diflerent from 
his own in Fielding. 
/ Great, however, as are Richardson's qualities, and immense as 
was the impetus which his poinilarity and his merits combined gave 
to the English novel, he cannot be said to have given that novel 



CHAP. II THE EIGllTEENTI-I-CENTURY NOVEL 6oi 

anything like a final or universal form. The scheme of letters, 
though presenting to the novelist some oljvious advantages and con- 
veniences, which have secured it not merely immediate imitation but 
continuance even to the present day, has disadvantages as obvious, 
and can never rise to the merits of prose narrative from the outside. ^ 
But it is one of not the least curiosities of literature that the attain- 
ment of the true and highest form actually resulted from an exercise 
in parody, which certainly cannot be regarded as in itself a very high, 
and has sometimes been regarded as almost the lowest, form of 
literature. It is less curious, and much less unexampled, that the 
author of this parody was a man who had already tried, with no very 
distinguished success, quite different kinds of writing. 

Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, in the south of 
Somerset, on 22nd April 1707. His birth was higher than that of 
any man of letters of all work who had preceded him. The house 
of Fielding claimed kindred with that of Hapsburg ; it 
had ranked among English gentry since the twelfth 
century ; and in the century before the novelists birth it had been 
ennobled by two peerages, the earldom of Denbigh in England and 
that of Desmond in Ireland. Henry Fielding himself was great- 
grandson of the first Earl of Desmond of this creation, but was, of 
course, unconnected with the great Geraldines who came to an end 
when they rebelled against Elizabeth. His grandfather was a canon 
of Salisbury, his father a general in the army who had seen service 
under Marlborough ; his mother's father was a Justice of the King's 
Bench, and it was at his house that the novelist was born. Nor is it 
to be omitted that he was a near cousin of Lady Mary Wortley 
Montagu, whose mother was a Fielding. 

But though his pedigree was thus undeniable, his immediate fore- 
bears had for two generations been younger sons, and his own 
patrimony was little or nothing. He was, indeed, well educated at 
Eton and at Leyden, but he seems to have found himself at twenty- 
one in London with a nominal allowance and no particular interest 
for any profession; though, like other young gentlemen, he was of 
the Inns of Court. He turned to the stage, and for not quite ten 
years produced a large number of plays, neither very bad nor very 
good, of which Tom Thumb, a burlesque " tragedy of tragedies," is 
perhaps the best, and certainly the only one which has kept any 
reputation. About 1735 he seems to have married a Miss Charlotte 
Craddock, who was very beautiful, very amiable, and an heiress in a 
small way ; but whether, as legend asserts. Fielding really set up for 
a country gentleman on the strength of her fortune, and spent it on 

1 In combination it can do wondrously, as in Redgauntlet, 



6o2 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTH-CENTURV LITERATURE bk. ix 

hounds and showy liveries, is quite uncertain. His theatrical 
enterprises being interfered with by some new legislation in 1737, he 
turned seriously to the law, was called to the Bar, and practised, or 
at least went on circuit, while in 1739 he contributed largely to the 
Champion, a paper on the Spectator pattern. ^ His first published, 
though probably not his first written novel, The History of the Ad- 
ventures 0/ Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, 
appeared in February 1742, when its author was almost exactly 
thirty-five. It was successful, and next year Fielding published three 
volumes of Miscellanies, the important parts of which are A Journey 
from this World to the N'ext, in the Lucianic manner which Tom 
Brown had made popular, and the mighty ironic story of Jonathan 
IVild. His wife died soon after this publication, and he married 
again, but not for some years afterwards. He returned to periodical 
essay-writing (the True Patriot and the Jacobite''s Journal) in 
'45 on the Whig side, and in 1749 he produced his third and 
greatest novel, Tom Jones. Meanwhile Lyttelton had obtained 
for him the position of Bow Street Magistrate, as it was called, or 
Justice of the Peace for Westminster, an office which, though poorly 
paid, was of enormous importance, for its holder practically had the 
police of London, outside the City walls, in his hands. He discharged 
its duties to admiration, and found time not merely to publish his last 
novel, Amelia, in 175 1, but to conduct the Covent Garden Journal 
for the greater part of 1752. His health, however, was ruined, and, 
trying to restore it by travel, he undertook in June 1754 the voyage 
to Lisbon which forms the subject of his last book, issued after his 
death. He reached the Portuguese capital in August, but died on 
the 8th of October. 

Fielding's first novel started as a deliberate burlesque of Pamela. 
Its hero is the brother of Richardson's heroine, and her trials are 
transferred to this Joseph. Nor did Fielding ostensibly give up his 
scheme throughout the book ; but his genius was altogether too 
great to allow him to remain in the narrow and beggarly elements of 
parody, and after the first few chapters we forget all about Richard- 
son's ideals and morals. The great character of Mr. Abraham 
Adams — a poor curate, extremely unworldly, but no fool, a scholar, a 
tall man of his hands, and a very Good Samaritan of ordinary life — is 
only the centre and chief of a crowd of wonderfully lifelike characters, 
all of whom perform their parts with a verisimilitude which had never 

1 Fielding's dramatic, periodical, and miscellaneous works must be sought in 
the original editions, the best of which is in 4 vols. 4to (London, 1762), or in 
the great ediUoii de luxe of Mr. Leslie Stephen. The present writer attempted a 
selection I'rom iln m in the last volume of an issue of the novels, the Journey, and 
the Voyage, which he superintended (12 vols, London, 1893). 



V 



CHAP. 11 THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 603 

been seen before off the stage, and very seldom there ; while the new 
scheme of narrative gave an infinitely wider and more varied scope 
than the stage ever could give. Moreover, one of the instruments of 
this vivid presentation — an instrument the play of which not seldom 
sufficed in itself to make the literary result — was a very peculiar 
irony, almost as intense as Swift's, though less bitter, indeed hardly 
bitter at all, and dealing with life in a fashion which, but for being 
much more personal and much less poetic, is very nearly of the same 
kind as Shakespeare's. 

In his next published book, Jonathan Wild, this irony predomi- 
nates, and is more severe. The hero was a historical personage, an 
audacious and ingenious blend of thief and thief-taker, who had been 
hanged ten years earlier. Fielding's ostensible object in composing 
an imaginary party-history of him was to satirise the ideas of " great- 
ness" entertained by the ordinary historian — a design showing not 
imitation of, but sympathy with, certain ways of thought diversely 
illustrated by Swift and Voltaire. But his genius, intensely creative, 
once more broke away from this ideal — though the ironic side of 
Jonathan Wild is stronger than anything else in English or any 
literature outside the Tale of a Tub, and so strong that the book has 
probably on the whole shocked, pained, or simply puzzled more 
readers than it has pleased. But it is really as full of live personages 
as Joseph Andrews itself; and if these, being drawn almost entirely 
from the basest originals, cannot be so agreeable as the not more 
true but far more sympathetic characters of the earlier-published 
novel, they are, as literature, equally great, and perhaps more 
astonishing. 

It was, however, in his third and longest novel, Tom Jones, that 
Fielding attained a position unquestionable by anything save mere 
prejudice or mere crotchet. Joseph Andreivs had been, at least in 
inception, only a parody, and Jonathan Wild mainly a satire ; the 
former, though not destitute of plot, had had but an ordinary and 
sketchy one, and the latter chiefly adapted actual facts to a series of 
lifelike but not necessarily connected episodes. Tom Jones, on the 
contrary, is as artfully constructed as the most nicely proportioned 
drama, and, long as it is, there is hardly a character or an incident 
(with the exception of some avowed episodic passages, made toler- 
able and almost imperative by the taste of the day and the supposed 
example of the classical epic) which is not strictly adjusted to the 
attainment of the story's end. To us, perhaps, this is a less attraction 
than the vividness of the story itself, the extraordinarily lifelike pres- 
entation of character, and (though this is a charm less universally 
admitted) the piquancy of the introductory passages. In these — ■ 
after a manner no doubt copied from the parabases or addresses to 



6o4 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE BK. IX 

the audience in the chorus of the older Attic comedy, and itself 
serving, beyond all doubt likewise, as a model to the later asides of 
Thackeray — Fielding takes occasion sometimes to discuss his own 
characters, sometimes to deal with more general points. But the 
characters themselves, and the vivacity with which they are set to 
work, are the thing. The singular humanity of Tom Jones himself, 
a scapegrace even according to the ideas of his time, but a good 
fellow ; the benevolence, not mawkish or silly, of Allworthy ; the 
charms and generosity of Sophia ; the harmless foibles of Miss 
Western, the aunt, and the coarse but not offensive clownishness of 
her brother, the Squire, with the humours of Partridge the school- 
master, and others, have always satisfied good judges. Even among 
the black sheep, Lady Bellaston, shameless as she is, is a lady ; and 
at the other end of the scale. Black George, rascal as he is, is a man. 
Only perhaps the villain Blifil is not exactly human, not so much by 
reason of his villainy, as because Fielding, for some reason, has 
chosen to leave him so. 

There is somewhat less power and life in A/Jiclia, though its 
sketches of London society in the lower and middle classes are 
singularly vivid, and though the character of the heroine as an 
amiable wife, not so much forgiving injuries as ignoring their com- 
mission, has been almost idolised by some. But no other novelist of 
the time — and by this the novelists were numerous — • could have 
written it. 

On the whole, if we are to pronounce the novel as such present 
for the first time in the pages of any writer, it must be in those of 
Fielding rather than in those of Richardson. Johnson, in his 
prejudice, endeavoured to set the latter above the former by com- 
paring Fielding to a man who can only tell the time, and Richardson 
to one who can put together the watch. The point may be very 
stoutly argued ; but if it be admitted, it can be turned against John- 
son. For F'ielding does tell the clock of nature with absolute and 
universal correctness, while Richardson's ingenious machinery, some- 
times strikes twenty-five o'clock, and constantly gives us seconds, thirds, 
and other troublesome details instead of putting us in possession of 
the useful time of day. And in fact the comparison itself will not 
really hold water. Fielding does not parade his mechanism as 
Richardson does, but his command of it is every whit as true, and in 
reality as delicate. He first in English,^ he thoroughly, and he in 
a manner unsurpassable, put humanity into fictitious working after 
such a fashion that the effect hitherto produced only by the dramatist 
and poet, the practical re-creation and presentation of life, was 

1" III English," for, as he himself was eager to confess, Cervantes in Spanish 
had not merely preceded him, but had served as his model. 



^ 



CHAP. II THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 605 

achieved in the larger and fuller manner possible only to the prose 
novelist. 

The novels of Tobias George Smollett relapse in appearance and 
general plan upon a form — that of the " picaresque " or advent- 
ure-novel — older than that of Fielding or even of Ricliardson ; but 
in reality they contributed largely to the development 

r 1 £ .• ^^ • 1 u • . Smollett. 

01 the new fiction. Ineir author was born in 1721 at 
Dalquhurn, in the West of Scotland, and was a member of a good 
family, of which, had he lived a little longer, he would have become 
the head. He was born, however, the younger son of a younger son, 
and the harsh treatment of Roderick Random by his relations has 
been thought to reflect upon his own grandfather. Sir James 
Smollett of Bonhill, Judge of the Commissary Court of Scotland, 
M.P., and Commissioner for the Union. However this may be, 
Smollett, though well educated, had to make his own way in the 
world, and was apprenticed to a Glasgow surgeon. He practised at 
different times during his life, but his real profession was literature, 
by which he set out to make his fortune in London at the age of 
eighteen. He did not make it with a bad and boyish tragedy, T/ie 
Regicide} but took the place of surgeon's mate on board a man-of- 
war in the Carthagena expedition of 1640. He does not seem to have 
served long, but remained for some years in the West Indies, and 
probably there married his wife, Anne Lascelles, a small heiress. Re- 
turning to England, he tried poems and plays with no success, and 
then in 1748 turned to novel-writing with a great deal, as the deserved 
reward oi Roderick Random. 

From this time onward Smollett was a novelist by taste and 
genius, and a man of letters of all work by necessity. In the former 
capacity he wrote and published Peregrine Fickle (1751), Ferdinand., 
Count Fathom (1753), Sir Lancelot Greaves in 1760, and in 1771 
Humphrey Clinker. In the latter he edited the Critical Review., 
wrote a very popular and profitable History of England, gave an 
account, in an ill-tempered but not uninteresting book, of his Travels 
in France and Italy, and did a great deal of miscellaneous work, 
including a fierce and foul, but rather dull, political lampoon. The 
Adventures of an Atom. His health, between hard work and the 
hard living then usual, broke down early, and making a second visit to 
Italy, he died at Leghorn in October 1771. 

Smollett's miscellaneous work, though almost always competent, 

1 Smollett's plays and poems are seldom reprinted with the numerous editions 
of his novels, but may be found in Chalmers ; his History is on all the stalls ; his 
criticisms and miscellaneous works have never been, and are never likely to be, 
collected in full. The Travels, which are worth reading, have been more than 
once reprinted. 



6oG MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 



and sometimes much more, need not detain us ; liis novels, excellent 
in tliemselves, are of the highest historical importance. It has been 
said that he fell back on the adventure-scheme. Plot he hardly 
attempted ; and even, as regards incident, he probabl)', as Thackeray 
says, " did not invent much," his own varied experiences and his 
sharp eye for humorous character giving him abundant material. In 
Rflderick Randoin he uses his naval experiences, and perhaps others, 
to furnish forth the picture of a young Scotchman, arrogant, un- 
scrupulous, and not too amiable, but bold and ready enough ; in 
Peregrine Fickle he gives that of a spendthrift scapegrace, heir to 
wealth ; in Fathom he draws a professional chevalier ((''Industrie. 
The strange fancy which made him attempt a soft of " New Quixote " 
in Sir Lancelot Greaves has seldom been regarded as happy, either 
in inception or in result; but in Humphrey Clinker we have the very 
best of all his works. It is written in the letter form, the scenes and 
humours of many places in England and Scotland are rendered with 
admirable picturesqueness, while the book has seldom been excelled 
for humorous character of the broad and farcical kind- Matthew 
Bramble, the testy hypochondriac squire who is at heart one of the 
best of men, and in head not one of the foolishest ; his sour-visaged 
and greedy sister Tabitha ; her maid Winifred Jenkins, who has 
learnt the art of grotesque misspelling from Swift's Mrs. Harris, and 
has improved upon the teaching ; the Scotch soldier of fortune, Lisma- 
hago, — these are among the capital figures of English fiction, as in 
the earlier books are the Welsh surgeon's mate Morgan, Commodore 
Trunnion, and others. 

Besides this conception of humorous if so«iewhat rough character, 
and a remarkable faculty of drawing interiors which accompanies it, 
and in which he perhaps even excels Fielding, Smollett made two 
very important contributions to the English novel. The first was 
the delineation of national types in which he, almost for the first 
time, redut.ed and improved the stock exaggerations of the stage to 
a human and artistic temper. The second, not less important, was 
the introduction, under proper limitations, of the professional interest. 
He had, thougli less of univ-ersality than Fielding, yet enough of it to 
be successful with types in which he had only observation, not 
experiment, to guide him, but he was naturally most fortunate with 
what he knew from experience, sailors and '■' medical gentlemen." 
Until his time the sailor had been drawn almost entirely from the 
outside in English literature. Smollett first gives him to us in his 
habit as he lived, and long continued to live. To these great merits 
must be added one or two drawbacks — a liardness and roughness of 
tone approaching ferocity, and not more distinguislied from the some- 
what epicene temper of Richardson than from the manly but 



CHAP, n THE EIGHTEENTH-CEN rURY NOVEL 607 

kindly spirit of Fielding, and an extreme coarseness of imagery and 
language — a coarseness which can hardly be called immoral, but 
which is sometimes positively revolting. 

One element, however, or one special commixture of elements, 
remained to be added in fiction, and then (if we except such minor 
varieties as the terror-novel to be handled shortly) it remained with 
no important addition or progress until the day of Scott 
and Miss Austen within the present century. This was 
supplied, that the three kingdoms might be separately and proportion- 
ately represented, by Laurence Sterne,^ an Irishman by birth at least, 
and something of an Irishman in temperament. The Sternes were 
an East-Anglian family which, after a member became Archbishop of 
York in the seventeenth century, was chiefly connected with York- 
shire. Laurence was the son of Roger Sterne, a captain in the 
army, who was the younger son of Simon Sterne of Elrington, third 
son of the Aixhbishop, and he was born at Clonmell, where his father 
was quartered, in 17 13, was educated at Halifax, and went thence to 
Jesus College, Cambridge, of which, many years before, the Arch- 
bishop had been Master. He took his degree in 1736, and orders 
soon afterwards, receiving the livings of Sutton and Stillington as 
well as minor preferment in York chapter. He married Elizabeth 
Lumley in 1741, and for some twenty years seems to have felt, or at 
any rate indulged, no literary ambition. But on New Year's Day 1760 
there appeared in York and London the first volume of The Life and 
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. It was immediately popular, it 
made its author a lion in the capital, and it turned his attention 
definitely to literary work, society, and foreign travel. During the 
remaining nine years of his life he continued Tristram Shandy at 
intervals, issued some volumes of Sermons, travelled and resided 
abroad, and embodied some of the results of this travel in A Senti- 
mental Journey. This last appeared only just before his de?»th, after 
some previous escapes from lung disease, on i8th March 1768. 

Sterne's work — his Sermons even to some degree, his two novels 
to a much greater — is the most deliberately and ostentatiously 
eccentric in the higher ranges of English literature ; and being so, 
contains an element of mere trick, which inevitably impairs its value. 
If a man will not, and does not, produce his effects without such 
mechanical devices as continual dashes, stars, points, and stopped 
sentences, even blank pages, blackened pages, marbled pages, and 
the like, he must lay his account with the charge that he cannot 

1 The standard edition of Sterne — novels, sermons, and not quite complete 
letters — -is in 10 vols. The work other than the novels has been often omitted in 
reprints; but, as in the case of Fielding, the present writer has arranged a selection 
from it in 2 vols. (London, 1894). 



6o8 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 



produce them without such apparatus. The charge, however, is in 
Sterne's case unjust; for though the "clothes-philosophy" of his style 
is fantastically adjusted, there is a real body both of style and of 
matter beneath. 

Tristram Shandy, the pretended history of a personage who 
rarely appears, is, in fact, a " rigmarole " of partly original, partly 
borrowed, humour, arranged in the style which the French c'aW fatrasie, 
and of which Rabelais' great books are the most familiar, though 
not quite the normal, type. Although Tristram himself is the shadow 
of a shade, Sterne manages to present the most vivid character- 
pictures of his father, Walter Shandy, and his Uncle Toby (the latter 
the author's most famous, if not his greatest, creation), together with 
others, not much less achieved, of Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby's 
servant and comrade in the Marlborough wars, Mrs. Shandy, 
Widow Wadman, Dr. Slop, and others. And he thus gives a real 
novel-substance to a book which could otherwise hardly pretend to 
the title of novel at all. The Sentimental Joiirtiey, a pretended (and 
no doubt partly real) autobiographic account of a journey through 
France to the Italian frontier, is planned on no very different general 
principle, and has its own medallions of character, though they are 
less elaborately worked and less closely grouped- 

Both books depend for their literary effect on a large number of 
means — out-of-the-way reading, of which Sterne availed himself with 
a freedom which has brought upon him the charge of plagiarism ; 
very real though occasionally exaggerated pathos ; a curiously 
fertile though not extremely varied fancy ; and a considerable indul- 
gence, not in coarseness of the Smollettian kind, but in indecent hint 
and innuendo. But their main appeal lies in two things — a kind of 
humour which, though sometimes artificial and seldom reaching the 
massive and yet mobile humanity of Fielding, has a singular trick of 
grace, and a really intimate knowledge of human nature, combined 
and contrasted with a less natural quality, to which France at the 
time gave the name of "• Sensibility " and England that of " Senti- 
ment." It was this last which gave Sterne his immediate popularity, 
though perhaps for a generation or two past that popularity has 
been rather endangered by it ; and it is still this which gives him his 
most distinct place, though not his greatest value, in literary history. 
For it, like the prominence of a less definite kind of the same quality 
in Richardson, shows the reaction from the rather excessive hardness 
and prosaic character of the earlier decades. This reaction was not 
yet directed in the right way. It was still powdered and patched, 
deliberate, artificial, fashionable. It bore to true passion very much 
the same relation which the mannerism of Ossian bore to true 
romance, and Strawberry Hill Gothic to real Pointed architecture. 



CHA1-. II THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 609 

It was theatrical and mawkish ; it sometimes toppled over into the 
ludicrous, or the disgusting, or both. But it shows at worst a blind 
groping after something that could touch the heart as well as amuse 
the head. 

Perhaps it was the popularity of Richardson and Fielding, as 
early as the first years of the fifth decade of the century, but more 
probably the aura or prevalent tendency of general thought, which 
brought about a great expansion and multiplication of the 
novel about 1750.^ Few of the minor results of this novelists. 
retain much reputation even with students of the 
subject, and most are not over-accessible. Some of them have 
obtained an additional prop from the mention and criticism of Lady 
Mary {vide supra et infra). We have mentioned Mrs. Haywood's 
books. Francis Coventry's Poinpcy tlie Little (1751) was the most 
amusing, as Charles Johnstone's C/uysal, or The Adventures of a 
Guinea (1760) was the most powerful, of a kind of personal fiction 
whereof a memorable example survives in the Memoirs of a Lady of 
Quality, inserted (one regrets to say for money) by Smollett in 
Peregrine Pickle, and doubtless rewritten by him from the materials 
of the beautiful and liberal Viscountess Vane. The too notorious 
Dr. Dodd attempted to combine Sterne and Smollett, and succeeded 
in combining the most objectionable parts of each without any of 
their genius, in The Sisters ; Dr. Hawkesworth followed Dr. Johnson 
with steps of his usual inequality in Ahnoran and Hamet (1761). 
But the most interesting work in fiction of the middle of the 
century is to be found in two books, eccentric in more senses than 
one, fohn Buncle (1750-66) and The Fool of Quality (1766-70). 
The first was the work, though by no means the only work, of a 
curious Irishman named Thomas Amory, who was born in 1691 and 
died in 1788, who assures us that he was intimate with Swift, and 
on whom it would be extremely interesting to have Swift's ojDinion. 
Amory began in 1755, with a book, not improbably composed on 
French models and called Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great 
Britain. But this, though interesting, pales before the Life of 
John Buncle, Esq. The hero is an enthusiastic Unitarian, the 
husband of seven wives of surpassing beauty, a man of letters in a 
way, a man of science, and distinctly marked with the madness 
which no doubt existed in a temperate and intangible form in his 

1 Most of the books mentioned from this point to the end of the chapter will 
be found in the above-noted collection of Harrison, or in Scott's Ballantyne 
novels, sometimes in both. The latter, in ten capacious but unwieldy volumes, 
contains all the four great novelists (including Smollett's translations), the 
Adveiifiircs of a Guinea, Johnson's, Walpole's, and Goldsmith's novels, Mackenzie, 
Bage, Mrs. Radcliffe, Gulliver's Travels, Cumberland's Henry, and Clara Reeve's 
Old Eftj^lish Baron. 
2K 



6io MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

creator. The book, which is entirely sui generis, fascinated Hazlitt, and 
has been reprinted, but never widely read. 

A much more respectable and an almost equally interesting book, 
thougli a worse novel, seeing that it attempts innumerable things 
which the novel cannot manage, is The Fool of Quality. The author 
of tills, Henry Brooke, was like Amory an Irishman, was born in 
County Cavan in 1703, and died at Dublin in 1783. He was, also 
like Amory, mad, and died so. He had money, education, and 
abundant ability, while in his earlier manhood he was familiar with 
the best literary society of London. In 1735 ^^ published a poem 
called Universal Bounty, which is worth notice, though it has been too 
highly praised ; four years later a play, Giistaviis Vasa. Ihe Fool of 
(2nality, or The Adventures of Henry, Earl of Morland, is a wholly 
unpractical book and a chaotic history, but admirably written, full of 
"shrewdness and wit, and of a singularly chivalrous tone. Nor must 
we leave out the really exquisite Peter Wilkins, of an almost unknown 
author, Robert Paltock, which appeared in 1751. In conception it was 
a sort of following of Gulliver, but Paltock has little satire and no 
misanthropy, and the charm of his book, which once was a boys' 
book, and now delights some men, dejDends on his ingenious wonders, 
and on the character of the flying girl Youwarkee, the only heroine 
(except Fielding's) of the eighteenth-century novel who has very 
distinct charm. 

The contributions of Johnson and Goldsmith to the novel will be 
best mentioned with their other work. But the history, as we can 
give it here, of eighteenth-century fiction proper is incomplete without 
,„ , , a notice of the curious terror-novel which, anticipated 
by Horace Walpole, had its special time in the last decade 
of tlie century, the work of Fanny Burney, that of IVIackenzie, and 
some others. Walpole himself will occupy us later. The incongruity 
of most of his work and character with the Castle of Otranto has 
always attracted and puzzled critics ; nor is there perhaps any better 
explanation tlian that the Castle, momentous as its example proved, 
was mainly an accident of that half-understood devotion to "the 
Gothick " which was common at the time (1764), and of which Walpole 
as a dilettante, if not as a sincere disciple, was one of the chief Eng- 
lish exponents. The story is a clumsy one, and its wonders are 
perpetually hovering on the verge of the burlesque. But its influence, 
though not immediate, was exceedingly great. 

Its nearest successor, the Old English Baron of Clara Reeve in 
1777, imitated rather Walpole's Gothicism than his ghostliness. 
Nor can the extremely remarkable and almost isolated novelette 
of Vathelc (1783) be set down to Walpolian influence though it 
undoubtedly did exemplify certain general tendencies of the day. 



CHAP. II THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 6ir 

Its author, William Beckford, was the son of a rather prominent 
politician in the City of London, and inherited very great wealth. 
He travelled a good deal, leaving much later literary 
memorials of his travels ; he collected books ; he built 
two gorgeous palaces, one in England, at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and 
another in Portugal, at Cintra ; and he in many respects was, and 
perhaps deliberately aimed at being, the ideal English " milord " of 
continental fancy- — rich, eccentric, morose, generous at times, and 
devoted to his own whimsical will. Such a character is generally 
contemptible in reality, but Beckford possessed very great intellectual 
ability, and Vathek stands alone. Its debts to the old Oriental tale 
are more apparent than real , those to the fantastic satirical romance 
of Voltaire, though larger, do not impair its main originality ; and a 
singular gust is imparted to its picture of unbridled power and 
unlimited desire by the remembrance that the author himself was, in 
not such a very small way, the insatiable voluptuary he draws. The 
picture of the Hall of Eblis at the end has no superior in a certain 
slightly theatrical, but still real, kind of sombre magnificence, and the 
heroine Nouronihar is great. 

Mrs. Radcliffe (Anne Ward) — who was born in 1764, and did not 
die till 1822, but who published nothing after the beginning of 
the nineteenth century, though some work of hers appeared post- 
humously — produced in the course of a few years a series 
of elaborate and extremely popular work, which has not 
retained its vitality so well as has Vathek — The Castles of Athlin 
and Duiibayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Ro /nance of 
the Forest (1791), the celebrated Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), and 
The Italian (1797). Mrs. Radcliffe is prodigal of the mysteries which 
figure in the title of her most famous work, of castles and forests, of 
secret passages and black veils ; but her great peculiarity is the con- 
stant suggestion of supernatural interferences, which conscientious 
scruple, or eighteenth-century rationalism, or a mere sense of art, as 
constantly leads her to explain by natural causes. 

Matthew Lewis, her successor, and (though he denied it) pretty 
certainly her imitator, had no such scruples, and in his notorious 
Monk and other stories and dramas simply lavished ghosts and 
demons. This department of the novel produced, unless 
I'athek be ranked in it, nothing of very high literary 
value, but its popularity was immense, and it probably did some real 
good by enlarging the sphere and quickening the fancy of the 
novelist. 

There are more than a few names of note who might be criticised 
if space permitted, and who must at any rate be mentioned. Henry 
Mackenzie (i 745-1 831), who followed Sterne in sentiment, though 



6i2 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

not in other ways, drew floods of tears with The Man of Feeling 
(1771), The Man of the Pl'orld, and fu/i'a de Roiibignc ; the political 
philosopher Godwin, who will reappear, produced, besides his still 
famous Caleb IVilliains (1794), other novels, St. Leon (1799), Flect- 
luood, Mandeville, etc.; Holcroft the dramatist (1745-1809) gave 
Alivyti, Hugh Trevor, and especially Anna St. Ives (1792) ; Robert 
Bage, a freethinking Quaker and a man of business, wrote no less 
than six fictions, some of them of great length ; Mrs. Inchbald (1753- 
1821), a beauty, an actress, a dramatist, and a novelist, gave to her 
Simple Story a certain charm; Hannah More (i 745-1 833), who was 
petted by Johnson in her youth, and petted the cliild Macaulay in 
her age, wrote Ca:lebs in Search of a Wife, a moral novel not untinged 
with social satire. The Zeluco of Dr. John Moore (1719-1802) is 
not insignificant. But the most important, though far from the most 
gifted, novelist of the latter years of the century was Frances Burney 
(1752-1840), the daughter of a historian of music, who was the intimate 
friend of Johnson and most of the men of letters of his time, a pet 
of the great lexicographer and of the society of the Thrales, for some 
time a member of the household of Queen Charlotte, and then the 
wife of a French refugee. From him she took the name Madame 
D'Arblay, by which she is more commonly known as a diarist, though 
almost the whole of that delightful part of her work deals with her 
maiden years. Miss Burney wrote in Evelina (1778) a not very 
well-arranged but extremely lively picture of the entrance of a young 
girl into society; in Cecilia (1781) a much more ambitious and 
regular but less fresh story of love and family pride. Her later 
novels, Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814), were, the former 
a partial, the latter a complete, failure. Her importance, however, 
consists in the fact that, at any rate in youth, she had a singular knack 
of catching the tone and manners of ordinary and usual society, and 
that by transferring these to her two first books she showed a 
way which all novelists have followed since. Her great predecessors 
of the middle of the century had not quite done this. Some of the 
stock ingredients of the older novel are indeed thrown in for Evelina's 
benefit, — the discovery of parentage, the bold attempts of unscrupulous 
lovers, etc., — but they are of no real importance in the story, which 
draws its entire actual interest from the faithful presentation of the 
most possible, probable, and ordinary events and characters. 



CHAPTPLR III 

JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 

Writers-of-all-work — Johnson's life — His reputation — Work — And style — 
Goldsmith — His verse — His prose — Other essayists 

The establishment of the calling of man of letters as an irregular 
profession, and a regular means of livelihood, almost necessarily 
brought with it the devotion of the man of letters himself to any and 
every form of literature for which there was a public 
demand. Addison N^as enabled by his preferments to aU-work." 
confine himself mainly to the essay — the new popular 
form of the time — and to the old popular form, the drama ; and Pope's 
paternal means, with the profits of the Homer, in the same way enabled 
him to be nothing but a poet. But the more evil days of the central 
decades necessitated a greater distribution of talent. The essay, 
succeeded though not ousted by the novel, continued to be the most 
strictly popular form of writing. But the drama had not ceased to 
be the most easily profitable — a man might throughout the eighteenth 
century make three or four hundred pounds much inore readily by 
dramatic writing than by any other kind. The poem, at least of the 
didactic kind dear to the time, continued to be the most dignified — 
the novice who, as most novices generously do, aspired to the praise 
as well as the pay, must still attempt a poem. And lastly, there was an 
ever-widening demand for those kinds of writing which may be hack- 
work or something more, according to the abilities and dispositions 
of their executants — for translation, historical and miscellaneous 
compilation, popular science. It became, therefore, almost necessary 
on the one hand, and comparatively easy on the other, for the 
denizen of " Grub Street " — that partly real, partly imaginary, wholly 
debatable abode of the average author from somewhat before 1725 
to considerably after 1775 — to be everything by turns and nothing 
long. The most distinguished members by far of the class were 
Johnson and Goldsmith, and it has therefore seemed desirable to 
notice all their work together here. But since perhaps their best, 

613 



6i4 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

and certainly their most congenial, work partook of the essay 
kind, they have been set at the head of the essayist class more 
particularly. 

Samuel Johnson 1 was born at Lichfield on i8th September 1709. 
He was the son of a bookseller, and therefore had ample and early 
opportunity to become acquainted with books. And his education, 
though fitful, was sufficient. After private schooling, he 
■^"we""^ was able to go to Pembroke College, Oxford, in his 
twentieth year, but his father, who, though of some posi- 
tion among his townsmen, had never been prosperous, died, and in 
1 73 1 Johnson, whose actual career at the University was spoilt by his 
poverty, had to leave without a degree. For a time he tried school- 
mastering — the almost invariable refuge of the destitute with literary 
tendencies. But he had no degree, his temper was unaccommodating, 
and his strange physical defects — very bad sight, convulsive move- 
ments, and other scrofulous symptoms — were about the worst possible 
equipment for the task. In his si.x-and-twentieth year he married a 
widow some twenty years his senior (with a little money, but not for 
it, for he was dotingly fond of her), and set up a private academy. But 
it was not successful, and in 1737 he went to London with his pupil 
Garrick. Few details of his life for many years are known, for Boswell, 
his biographer later, could get at little. What is certain is that he 
suffered all the pangs and rebuffs of poverty ; what is not quite so 
certain is whether his curious fitful indolence and his irritable temper 
had not more to do with this than sheer *' inauspicious stars." Before 
coming to London he had translated Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia; a 
year after he came he was a regular contributor to Cave's Gentlevtaii's 
Magazine, for which, from 1740 to 1743. he wrote half-real, half- 
imaginary debates in Parliament. In 1738 he had attracted the 
attention of Pope by publishing London, an imitation of Juvenal, 
wliich he was far to surpass later by another of the same kind, the 
sad and splendid Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). In 1747 he 
planned, and persuaded the booksellers to adopt, the scheme of his 
famous Dictionary, which was completed in eight years, and for which 
lie received fifteen hundred pounds, a sum not inconsiderable in itself, 
and large for the time, but naturally amounting to little more than 
starvation wages when the expenses were deducted, and the time of 
composition taken in. I n 1 750. having already, in ways not entirely com- 
prehensible, attained a high literary reputation, he issued the Rambler 
in the revived Spectator vein, and when he had finished it his wife 
died, never to be forgotten. Later he followed the Rambler with the 
Idler (not separately published), and wrote, to pay the expenses of his 

iThe best complete edition of Johnson is that of the " Oxford Classics," pub- 
lished three-quarters of a century ago. 



en. Ill JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 615 

mother's funeral, the taie of Rasselas (1759), less a novel than a gi'ave 
satire on liuman life. At last, in the new reign (1762), he received 
a pension of three hundred a year, which to him was wealth. The 
last twenty-two years of his life are better known, and were happier, 
owing to his friendship with the Thrales and Boswell, his clubs, and 
his position as literary dictator. But he wrote little, his Journey to 
the Western Islands of Scotland (1774), an agreeable book, with one 
immortal passage, and his admirable Livss of the Poets (1779-81) 
being the chief exceptions. His health, which had never been good, 
gave him some respite in early old age, but became worse again 
later, and after suffering from paralysis, dropsy, and asthma, he died 
on 13th December 1784, being buried in Westminster Abbey, and 
commemorated by a monument in St. Paurs. 

During the later part of his lifetime, Johnson was undoubtedly 
regarded as a sort of unofficial head of English literature, and 
also as a great philosopher and sage ; while the reaction and 
oblivion which so often follow in such cases were pre- 
vented by the singular charms of Boswell's Life (see last reputation. 
chapter of this Book). But the Romantic school bitterly 
disliked Johnson's literary principles and practice, though not his 
political and religious theories, while these latter have become 
unpopular since. It has thus been usual during the greater part of 
the present century to extol Johnson's moral character, and feel or 
affect delight in his biography, while assigning him no high place as 
a writer. It is tme that with the not quite certain exception of the 
Lives of the Poets, Johnson can claim no single work uniting bulk 
with value of matter and originality of form. His work in verse is 
very small, and though all of it is scholarly and some 'elegant, it is 
universally composed in obedience to a very narrow and jejune 
theory of English versification and English poetics generally.^ 
Nothing perhaps but the beautiful epitaph on his friend Levett, and 
the magnificent statement of his religious pessimism in the Vanity of 
Human Wishes, distinctly transcends mediocrity. His tragedy of 
/rene is a not very good example of an entirely artificial and lifeless 
kind. Although his essays have been oftener under- than over- 
valued of late, they are far from original in conception, and those 
at least of the Rambler are too often injured by the exces- 
sively stiff and cumbrous style which has been rather 
unjustly identified with Johnson's manner of writing generally. His 
Dictionary, though a wonderful monument of enterprise and labour, and 
though containing many acute and some witty definitions, is, as he well 
knew himself, but "drudgery," and his political pamphlets, though 

iThe poems on the Seasons are well worth study as instances of this. But it 
is fair to say that their authorship is not quite certain. 



6i6 MIDDLE AND LATER iSfH-CENTURY LITERATURE BK. ix 

forcible and sensible, and liis Journey to the Hebrides, though inter- 
esting, sufter also from "Johnsonese." His often beautiful prayers 
and meditations, his occasional work in inscriptions and the like, are, 
as well as the Dictionary, not easily classifiable literature, though, 
like that, they testify to the literary saturation of his mind and 
thought. Rasselas, an admirable though a mannered composition, 
and perhaps the chief document for Johnson's practical though melan- 
choly wisdom, must always underlie the objection that it holds itself 
out as a story, but has really no story to tell, nor even (save in 
Imlac, who is partly Johnson) any character to bring out. 

It is extremely fortunate that very late, and as it were acciden- 
tally, he was induced to leave an adequate and permanent monument 
of his powers in the Lives of the Poets. In these literary biographies, 
of which long before he had given an example in the Life of Savage^ 
he practically struck into a new development of the essay — one to 
which Dryden had sometimes come near, and which he would have 
carried out with surpassing excellence had the time been ripe, but 
which had not been actually anticipated by any. It is no matter that 
Johnson's standards and view-points are extravagantly and exclusively 
of his time, so that occasionally — the cases of Milton and Gray are 
the chief — he falls into critical errors almost incomprehensible except 
from the historic side. Even these extravagances fix the critical creed 
of the day for us in an inestimable fashion, while in the great bulk of 
the Lives this criticism does no harm, being duly adjusted to 
the subjects. Johnson's estimate of Chaucer doubtless would have 
been, as his Rainbler remarks on Spenser actually are, worthless, 
excepi as a curiosity. But of Dryden, of Pope, and of the numerous 
minor poets of their time and his, he could speak with a competently 
adjusted theory, with admirable literary knowledge and shrewdness, 
and with a huge store of literary tradition which his long and conver- 
sation-loving life had accumulated, and which would have been lost for 
us had he not written. 

But it would be unjust to limit Johnson's literary value to this 
book, or even to this plus the Vanity of Hu7nan Wishes, Rasselas, 
and the best of his essays. It was far more extensive, and the 
above referred to Johnsonese, the "great-whale" style 
which Goldsmith so wittily reprehended, was only an 
exaggeration of its good influence. Of the alternate fashions of 
prose which we have already surveyed in some instances, and shall 
survey in more, the dangers are also alternate. The ornate and 
fanciful style tends to the florid and the extravagant, and needs to be 
restrained and tamed ; the plain style tends to the slipshod and 
jejune, and needs to be raised and inspired. We have seen how, 
during the earlier prevalence of this latter, Addison and Swift came 



CH. in JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 617 

to its rescue from the mere colloquialism which distinguishes writers 
like L'Estrange. So Johnson in its later came (as in diiTerent ways 
did Gibbon and Burke) to its rescue from the jejuneness and lack of 
colour which distinguish writers like Middleton. 

His means may not have been perfect. His Latinising (not im- 
probably helped by some early work of his on Sir Thomas Browne), 
his somewhat ponderous swing of balanced phrase, his too mechanical 
antithesis, lie open to much easy ridicule and to some just censure. 
But even his more pompous and rhetorical style has nobility and 
dignity, while the vigorous conversational directness which he always 
maintained in speech, and by no means neglected wholly in writing, 
served to preserve it from mere stilted bombast. And as this 
characteristic pervades all his prose work, all his prose work possesses, 
and to the true historic judgment will always retain, interest and value 
accordingly. As a poet he can only rely on a tew trifles, playful or 
pathetic, and on the gorgeous declamation, rising to the level of true 
verse-eloquence, of The Vanity of Human Wishes. 

Oliver Goldsmith — " Dr. Minor " to Johnson's " Dr. Major," a 
curious parallel, complement, and twin, almost as conventional in 
theory, but with wider and sweeter humanity, less massive in thought 
as in form, but more mobile, with less wisdom and 

, , , , , „ , GoldsiTnth. 

conduct, but far more grace, fineness, and range — was 
born at or near Pallasmore, in County Longford, on loth November 
1728. The same neighbourhood, though not the same county, 
furnished the village of Lissoy, in West Meath, which has been 
identified as the suggesting, rather than the actual, scene oi.The 
Deserted Village. His father, a clergyman of the Church of il^eland 
(as was afterwards the brother to whom he dedicated The Traveller), 
was curate of both places. Oliver was educated at various schools and 
at Trinity College, Dublin, which, however, had not much better success 
with him as a student than it had had with Swift. He succeeded in 
taking his degree, but failed to qualify for orders, and after other 
failures went to Edinburgh to study physic. But after two years his 
restlessness sent him abroad, nominally to continue his studies at 
Leyden and Paris, really, it seems, to wander about the Continent, 
whence he returned with no money, some useful and stimulating 
experiences, and an exceedingly dubious degree of Bachelor of 
Medicine in the University of Louvain, or of Padua, or perhaps of 
Weissnichtwo, on the strength of which he was " Dr. (loldsmith " ever 
afterwards and sometimes attempted to practise. On his return he 
became an usher, a printer's reader, a reviewer, and hack to (Griffiths 
the publisher. 

At last, in 1759, he attracted some attention by his Enquiry into 
the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.^ an extraordinary 



6iS MIDDLE AND LATER 18TII-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

compound of good writing, bad taste, ignorance, mother-wit, and 
literary originality. He started The Bec,-7i. sliort-lived periodical 
containing the earlier forms of some of his best essay-work, and 
wrote for divers others (it was in Newbery's Public Ledger that the 
" Chinese Letters," which became The Citizen of the World, first 
appeared). The exact date and origin of The Vicar of Wakefield 
form a curious bibliographical puzzle, for though not published till 
later, it had probably been finished by 1762. He also did, at all 
times of his life, a great amount of hackwork, at first anonymous and 
wretchedly paid, afterwards signed and very well rewarded, though 
his incurable thriftlessness always kept him in difficulties. The 
Traveller, which, small as it is, gave him a very high reputation, 
appeared in 1 764 ; Tlie Vicar of Wakefield two years later ; and a 
third achievement in a third line, the comedy of The Good-natured 
Man, two years later still ; while after a similar interval The Deserted 
Village ratified his poetical, and in three more She Stoops to Conquer 
his dramatic, position. He died in April 1774 of fever, much in 
debt and disturbed in mind, but beloved and lamented by all the 
best and greatest men of his day. His foibles were numerous. The 
odd contradictions of Goldsmith's mind and temper have been a 
favourite subject with biographers and essayists. Garrick's famous 
line — 

He wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll — 

seems to have been generally justified, though occasionally Goldsmith 
was more than a match for his society. His work — not merely his 
hack compilations — abounds in the most ludicrous blunders and 
evidences of ignorance ; his critical faculties were utterly haphazard. 
As for moral traits, though the idleness of his youth certainly did not 
characterise his manhood, and though there is not much proof that 
after he became industrious he was, as he certainly was earlier, a 
gambler, he had none of the prudential virtues. With an income 
probably at least three times as large as Johnson's ever was, he died 
two thousand pounds in debt. But much of this seems to have been 
due to his generosity to others — a quality which, with his general 
kindliness of heart, has never been denied. And in literature he 
was, as Johnson himself emphatically said, "a very great man." His 
plays had best be left to give some savour and substance to that chapter 
on eighteenth-century drama, which, but for him and for Sheridan, 
would be indeed a thin thing; the rest of his work may be noticed 
here. 

The poetical part is surprisingly small in bulk, but full of quality, 
though not always of strictly poetical quality. It consists of The 
Traveller and Tlie Deserted Village, each of rather more than 400 



CH, III JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 619 

lines ; of the pretty but not very strono; ballad of The Hermit, better 
known as '-Edwin and Angelina"; of the two capital light poems 
in swinging anap^st, The Haunch of Venison and Re- 

. . His verse. 

taliation ; of a quite unimportant Oratorio ; and of a 
few pages of miscellaneous verse, the best things of which are the 
(\\x2im\. Jen if esprit, "Tho. Description of an Author's Bed-chamber," 
"The Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog," the famous Stanzas on 
Woman — "When lovely woman stoops to folly," the pathetic-humorous 
epitaph on Ned Purdon, and the sardonic elegy on Airs. Mary Blaize. 
This latter division, especially with the brilliant Retaliation, a string of 
consummate repartees on his mentors of the Club (^except Johnson), 
displays, with the additional zest of verse, the qualities which we shall 
note more fully in Goldsmith's prose. His two serious and, so to 
speak, "•full-dress" poems are a curious contrast. It is certain that 
they enjoyed the benefit of Johnson's criticism, and not improbable 
that they underwent rehandling from him ; and they show not merely 
that rigid adherence to the older couplet as vehicle which he preferred, 
but a great similarity to his general ways of thought. They excel the 
London and The Vanity of Human Wishes as much in grace, variety, 
and sense of nature as they fall short of the Vanity in grandeur and 
force ; but they are not in their own fashion devoid either of force or 
of grandeur. They were the last really great work of the artificial- 
conventional school of verse, and not far from its greatest. 

In prose-writing, when he did not endeavour to be critical of 
literature. Goldsmith was exposed to few disadvantages by his time 
and school, and he brought extraordinary gifts of his own. In the 
first place, he could be almost as sentimental as Sterne 
and even more pathetic, without Sterne's approaches '^ P^ose. 
either to the maudlin or the grotesque. In the second jDlace, he had 
a quite miraculous gift of seizing, in the re-creative fashion, touches 
and traits in humanity — a gift shared by no one else in his century 
save Fielding, and of a kind quite different from Fielding's. Lastly, 
and for the purposes of literature most important of all, he had the 
gift of an altogether charming .style, which is impossible to analyse 
and very difiicult even to describe vaguely ; so that it has never been 
successfully imitated, though Thackeray has, by a different route, some- 
times reached very similar effects. 

Goldsmith put a little of this style in his merest hack compila- 
tions, but he used it to the best effect partly in scattered essay 
productions loosely following the Spectator model, partly in The Vicar 
of M'akefehi, and partly in the book called The Citizen of the World. 
The ostensible scheme of this last follows Montesquieu and many 
others so as to satirise English society by representing it as it appears 
to an Oriental. This scheme as such was a little stale ; it had been 



620 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTlI-CENTURV LITERATURE bk. ix 

used again and again from Tom Brown downwards, nor were 
Goldsmith's powers of philosophic reflection or of social satire exactly 
those required for it. But in his hands it served as the opportunity 
foV the creation and working out of the most delightfully live figures, 
of whom the shabby Beau Tibbs is only the most famous and hardly 
the best. Perliaps his most wonderful thing is the " Reverie at the 
Boar's Head," which, though some of it is cut-and-dried political or 
religious polemic, is unique in the work of the eighteenth century 
outside Swift, and possesses an easy lambent light of fancy which 
the fierce blaze of Swift's genius rarely allowed him to give. 

It was in the handling of the Essay — for all his important prose 
work really belongs to this class, even the Vicar having strong inclina- 
tions thereto — that (ioldsmith's greatest importance in the history of 
English prose literature consists. Johnson had not carried the scheme 
or scope of his Ramblers and Idlers much, if at all, beyond the 
Steele-Addison model ; and though the contemporary revivers of this, 
who will presently be noticed, modernised the subjects a little, they 
did not much alter the style. But Goldsmith holds out a hand to 
Leigh Hunt on one side as he does to Steele on the other in point of 
selection of subjects and mode of treatment ; while he far excels 
both* in that quintessential quality of style which is of more 
supreme importance in the Essay than anywhere else. The greatest 
of all miscellaneous writers on the lighter side in the eighteenth 
century, as Johnson is the greatest of its miscellaneous writers on the 
more serious — this is a title which Goldsmith cannot be grudged or 
denied ; and when it is remembered that he was also one of its best 
tale-tellers, the best, with only one possible rival, of its dramatists, 
and one of the most noteworthy of its poets, Johnson's verdict will 
hardly be thought undeserved. 

The Rambler and at least the earlier essays of Goldsmith 

were part of a second blossoming of the periodical or occasional 

essay, which appeared about the middle of the century, and continued 

with intervals to the very eve of the appearance of the 

essayists. ^^'^ reviews and magazines of the modern kind. There 

had indeed been things of the sort in the thirty years 

between the last attempts of Addison and Steele and the first of 

Johnson, but they had had little or no interest save such as is derived 

from the already mentioned fact that Fielding had a hand in some 

of them. 

The most noticeable except the Rambler and the Adventurer 
(a sort of imitation Rambler, edited by Hawkesworth, the great ape 
of Johnson, and contributed to by Johnson himself) was the World, 
which appeared between 1753 and 1756. This is noteworthy, 
because an attempt was made to make it a distinct "journal of 



CH. Ill JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 621 

society." The editor, Edward Moore, was a man of letters of some 
ability, who played the main part of '-Adam FitzAdam " — the 
eidolon who, according to the etiquette of the scheme, was supposed 
to produce the paper — very fairly. Its interest for us consists in the 
fact that among the contributors were some of the very chief of those 
men of fashion, Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, Soame Jenyns, Han- 
bury Williams, who at the time affected literature. It was in the 
World, for instance, that Chesterfield's well-meant, and in recent 
days rathpr unfairly treated, attempt to do a good turn to Johnson's 
Dictionary appeared, and drew from the nettled lexicographer the 
famous letter, which, though a magnificent piece of English, is not 
perhaps as magnanimous, or even as just, as it is magnificent. Soon 
after the World appeared, with a less brilliant staff, but still written 
" by gentlemen for gentlemen," the Connoisseur of Colman the 
Elder and Bonnel Thornton, where the eidolon was " Mr. Town," 
and where Cowper produced the few examples of literature that we 
have from him before his terrible ailment and his long abstinence 
from writing. Another long gap, with nothing of importance except 
(and this is of very great importance) the work of Goldsmith, brings 
us to the two interesting periodicals, the Mirror (1779-80) and the 
Lomiger (1785-87), issued at Edinburgh, not in London, by Henry 
Mackenzie, the "Man of Feeling" {vide supra), and a knot of Scot- 
tish wits, lawyers, and literati generally. These periodicals give 
the usual direct and indirect information on costume, the manners 
of society, and the like, some vivid sketches of the Pitt and Fox 
struggle, some valuable literary criticism (Mackenzie's review of Burns, 
for instance), some interesting details about ''nabobs," and, above all, 
numerous evidences of the growing taste for the picturesque. , 

In the very last attempts to carry out the Spectator tradition, that 
have attained a sort of shelter from oblivion in the cavern of the 
British Essayists^ the Obse?'ver of Cumberland, and the Looker On 
of a clergyman named Roberts, there is little of interest except the 
proof that the form was really dead, though two respectable persons 
were trying to galvanise it. The actual Essay was before many years 
were over to break fresh ground in every direction, and with the novel 
to become the distinguishing form of the literature of the nineteenth 
century. But in this particular shape it had done its work. 

1 It has been thought sufficient to confine notice here to the contents of the 
standard collection of British Essayists by Chahners (45 vols. 1808), though it 
does not contain even the last and minor essays of Steele and Addison, or those 
of Fielding, much less the numerous attempts of less famous persons in the kind 
throughout the century. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE GRAVER PROSE 

Lateness of history in English — Hume — Robertson — Minors — Gibbon — The 
Autobiography — The Decline and Fall — His style — Burke — His rhetorical 
supremacy- — Qualities of his style and method — Theology and philosophy — 
Warburton — Paley — Adam Smith — Godwin — His importance and position 

Although the separation of this chapter froin the last may seem 
questionable, inasmuch as most things that Johnson at least wrote 
were grave, and as Goldsmith wrote copiously what he at least called 
history, there is sufficient justification for it in the fact that the Essay 
always and properly tends to lightness, to popular treatment, and that 
the historical school of the time is sufficiently important to have the 
principal place in a chapter which may also have other constituents. 
We may pass from it, taking the great figure of Burke as a point of 
junction, through writers on political philosophy to those on philoso- 
phy proper, and may also include the (for us and at this time) less 
iinportant section of theology. 

The de'.'elopment of historical writing, as apart from mere chron- 
icling, is necessarily somewhat late, but it was later in England than 
in any other country. At the close of the seventeenth century 
Lateness of Raleigh. Kuolles, and Clarendon stood practically alone 

history in jn English literature (nor was Clarendon yet printed) as 
English. ... , . , , „ r 1 , • ■ 1 

historians who united bulk of work to historical sense 

and merit of literary style. Even of these Raleigh is chiefly qualified 
by the beauty of his purple patches. Nor for some time after the 
beginning of the eighteenth century itself was there much improve- 
ment. But towards the middle of it remarkable changes were made 
by two Scottish scholars, Hume and Robertson, while towards the 
end the greatest historian in every sense that England has yet 
seen aro.se in Gibbon. 

David Hume belongs to this chapter by a double title as philos- 
opher and as historian, while he might almost have appeared in 
the last as essayist. He was born at Edinburgh in 171 1, his father 

622 



THE GRAVER PROSE 623 



being of the border clan of Home or Hume, and a Berwickshire 
laird ; but David was not the eldest son. He went to the University 
of his native town, tried law, tried commerce in England, 
but liked neither, and had just sufficient means to enable 
him to fall back on private study. It was after a visit to France that 
he published (in 1739) his remarkable Treatise of Hiiinan Nature, 
and he followed it up two or three years later with Essays Moral 
ami Political. But he still had no fixed employment, and for some 
years he tried tutorships, secretaryships, and the like. He competed 
in vain for more than one professorship in the Scottish Universities, 
but was appointed Keeper of the Advocates' Library. Before this he 
had published (1748) an Enquiry concerning Human Understanding 
and (1751) an Enquiry into the Principles of Morals. These later 
books were in some sort refashionings of the earlier. It was not till 
1754 that he began his celebrated History of England m\\\Q.\-mA.dii& 
by a volume on the two first Stuarts, which he afterwards extended 
forward to the Revolution and backward to the beginnings. The 
whole took eight years to finish. He also published Dissertations 
in 1762, and some posthumous work has to be added. His later 
years were as prosperous as his earlier had been uncertain. In 1763 
he was made Secretary of Legation in Paris, where he was quite at 
home, and three years later he became Under Secretary for the Home 
Department. He died in Edinburgh (1776). Hume was an amiable 
and friendly person, with some slight foibles of vanity and epicure- 
anism. His religious scepticism, which was at least as much a 
fashion of his time as it was necessarily connected with his philo- 
sophical views, does not directly concern us here. 

This sceptical tendency, however, applied in other directions, 
made him very important in philosophy and history, while his gifts 
of expression as applied to these two subjects made him at least 
equally important in literature. In philosophy he applied his criti- 
cism to the furthering of the Lockian system, not in the idealist- 
constructive direction of Berkeley, but in an almost wholly 
destructive way, abolishing the connection of cause and effect in 
favour of mere sequence, substituting a bare chain of thoughts for an 
independently thinking mind, and reducing everything to sensation ; 
in history he applied himself to the dissolution of the Whig myths. ■ 
His philosophical importance has lasted better than his historical, 
because his history, though full of ability, was written without access 
to many documents since laid open, and with a somewhat insuffi- 
cient attention to careful use of those that were accessible ; while his 
philosophy, needing nothing but the furniture of his own mind, and 
employing that in the best way on one side of perennially interesting 
and insoluble questions, remains a point de repere for ever. It is 



624 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

indeed admitted to have practically restarted all philosophical in- 
quiry, being as much the origin of German and other theory as of the 
Scottish school and of later English negative materialism. Luckily, too, 
the value of literary work as such is far more enduring than that of 
either philosophy or history by themselves. For they may be super- 
seded, but it never can. And Hume's expression was for his special 
purposes supreme — perfectly clear, ironical, but not to the point of 
suspicious frivolity, and as polished as the somewhat dead and flat 
colour of the style of the time would admit. 

William Robertson, a man of less original mental force than 

Hume, but nearly as good a writer, and a more careful historian, 

was born at Borthwick in Midlothian on 19th September 1721. 

„ , His father was a minister, and he himself, after school 

Kobeitson. , . . , . t^ ,, • i i -r^ i. , i 

and university education at Dalkeith and Edinburgh, 
became one. At about the age of thirty he became conspicuous in 
the General Assembly as leader of the " Moderate " or Latitudinarian 
party. And in 1759 he became joint minister of Greyfriars in 
Edinburgh ; his amicable differences with his Evangelical col- 
league Dr. Erskine are commemorated in Guy Mannering. He had 
just in the winter of 1758-59 published his Histo?y of Scolland With 
very great success, and in consequence of it he became chaplain to 
the King in 1761, Principal of the University a year later, and 
historiographer-royal in 1764. His second great work, ten years 
later than his first, was his Histoty of tJie Reign of Charles /., which 
brought him in a very large sum of money. He issued a third, the 
History of America^ in 1777, and a Disquisition on the Knowledge 
wliich the Ancients had of I )idia in 1791. Two years later he died. 
Robertson was a very popular man — even Johnson loved him, in spite 
of what might seem the three fatal defects of Scottish nationality, 
Whig politics, and Latitudinarian religion — but his personal popu- 
larity had no unfair influence on his historical successes. His style 
is, in the merely correct, but not merely jejune, kind, singularly 
good ; his conception of history, though not answering to that of 
more modern times, and tinged with the idiosyncrasies of his age, 
is philosophical and shrewd ; and above all, he had, what modern 
historians, with all their pretensions and all their equipment, have too 
often lacked, a thorough sense of rhetorical fitness in the good, not 
the empty, sense, and could make his histories definite works of art 
and definite logical presentments of a view. Nor was he by any 
means careless of research according to his own standard, which was 
already a severer one than that of Hume. 

A great deal of history was written in the third quarter of the 
century, most of which has in due course become waste-paper. 
The most characteristic specimens of this are naturally to be found 



CHAP. IV THE GRAVER TROSE 625 

in the historical work of Goldsmith and Smollett. The qualifica- 
tions, however, of neither were those of the historian proper. Both 
were writing rapidly as hacks ; and there is perhaps no 
department of literature which is so impatient of hack- 
work as history. But though neither had anything like the requisite 
knowledge, or gave anything like the requisite time and pains to his 
work, both had attractiveness. Goldsmith's exquisite style and 
singular instinctive knowledge of humanity, Smollett's faculty of 
narrative, and his strong, though not always impartial, sense, took 
their work out of the merely ephemeral as literature, though perhaps 
without giving it the qualities or the dignity of history. Of the 
numerous and sometimes not unnoteworthy writers of their own 
class and beneath them — the Psalmanazars, the John Campbells, and 
the rest — it is impossible to write here. 

But they helped the vogue of history, and so may have given a 
little impetus to the greatest historical book of the century, if not of 
all time, The Decline and Fall of the Rotiian Empire. Edward 
Gibbon was born at Putney in the spring of 1737, of a 
good and rather wealthy family. He was a very sickly 
child (indeed, he never had very good health), and seems to have 
been as unhappy as Cowper during his two years at Westminster. 
Nor was his stay at Magdalen College, Oxford, more fortunate. 
He went up too young (in April 1752), disliked the place and the 
college, and took into his head to profess himself converted to Roman 
Catholicism. After an interval his father sent him to Switzerland to 
be reconverted by a Protestant minister at Lausanne, M. Pavillard, 
whose endeavours were crowned by the rather dubious success that 
Gibbon on Christmas Day " received the sacrament with Protestant 
rites, and suspended his religious inquiries." The tone of his sub- 
sequent work would seem to indicate that the pendulum remained in 
an abnormal deflection from the perpendicular. He remained, how- 
ever, at Lausanne for some five years, reading much, as well as 
falling in love, and, at his father's command, out of it, with Mile. 
Suzanne Curchod, the future Madame Necker, and mother of Madame 
de Stael, to whom she did not transmit her own delicate beauty. 
Gibbon returned to England in 1758, writing French nearly as well 
as English, and with strong but indefinite literary aspirations. He 
served in the militia for some years and then again went abroad, 
finally conceiving, as he has told in one of the magical sentences of 
his autobiography, tlie definite idea of his great work on the 15th of 
October 1764. But he was in no hurry, and twelve years of residence 
in Switzerland and at home, of business anxieties after his fathers 
death, of silent membership of Parliament, and, for a time, of tenure 
of office as a Commissioner of Trade and Plantations, passed before 
2 s 



626 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 



the first volume appeared in February 1776. Another twelve, great 
part of which was passed in Switzerland, saw the completion, the 
actual moment of which he has recorded in as stately a fashion as 
that accorded to its beginning. In 1794 he died in London. 

Gibbon's miscellaneous work, both in English and French, is not 
inconsiderable, and it displays his peculiar characteristics; but the 
only piece of distinct literary importance is his Autobiography. This, 
upon which he seems to have amused himself by spend- 
Autobiography. i"g much pains, was left unsettled for press. Edited 
with singular judgment and success under the care of 
his intimate friend and literary executor Lord Sheffield, it has been 
for three generations one of the favourite things of its kind with all 
good judges, and is likely to continue so in the textns receptus, for 
which the fussy fidelity of modern literary methods will probably try 
in vain to substitute a chaos of rough drafts. 

Even this, however, is a mere hors (fcsiivre and kickshaw in 
comparison with the great History. According to the severest and 
most exacting conception of what history should be, it should satisfy 
three conditions. In the first place, the author should 
and Fail! l^^-vc thoroughly Studied and intelligently comprehended 
all the accessible and important documents on the 
subject. In the second, he should have so digested and ordered his 
information that not merely a congeries of details, but a regular 
structure of history, informed and governed throughout by a philo- 
.sophical idea, should be the result. In the third, this result should, 
from the literary as well as the historical side, be an organic whole 
composed in orderly fashion and manifesting a distinct and meri- 
torious style. It was in the first of these requisites, and to some 
extent in the second, that Gibbon's forerunners, including Robertson 
and Hume, had been chiefly deficient ; it is in the second, and to 
some extent in the third, that his successors of the modern historical 
school have fallen short. 

In the first two points, by common consent of all the competent. 
Gibbon attains an excellence which, when^ his time and circumstances 
are considered, is simply marvellous, and which does not lose much 
of its wonder even when the proviso is withdrawn. The unceasing 
rummage of a hundred years has added, of course, much in bulk to 
the mass of his information, but it has added much less in substance. 
For, on the one hand, Gibbon has the gift of understanding the true 
sense of all that he read ; and on the other, the gift of divining 
much that he could not or did not read. But his faculty of getting 
at individual truths is of less importance than his faculty of historical 
•' architectonic," his grasp of the historic sense. Almost his only 
drawback in this respect lay in the peculiarity of which he was 



CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 627 

probably, as men usually are of their weaknesses, most proud — his 
attitude of sceptical belittlement towards Christianity in jjarticular, 
though not much more to Christianity than to all forms of 
'•enthusiastic" religion. For, though he was far too acute a thinker 
and too much of a born historian not to see how great a part forces 
derived from this source had played, he was bound, on his own 
principles, to regard these results as merely due to folly and vanity, to 
something negative and false — a most unphilosophical theory, which 
Carlyle has executed in one of his greatest sentences about another 
matter. But Gibbon had no other fault as a historian (though as a 
man this lack of enthusiasm, and of comprehension of it, seems to 
have led him into some vanities and meannesses) than this, and even 
this was not fatal. 

Of his greatness as a man of letters there should have been even 
less doubt; but it has not been invariably acknowledged. The strong 
reaction of early Romanticism involved him in the dislike with which it 
regarded all its more immediate predecessors of the eighteenth century ; 
and Coleridge, who gave the tone to all English criticism 
for many years, was particularly unjust to Gibbon's style. 
Even his own day was half-puzzled and half-repelled by the gorgeous- 
ness of it, just as the succeeding age was by its extreme stateliness 
and want of alert variety. For Gibbon, like Johnson, of whom we 
have spoken, and Burke, of whom we are to speak, was a' most 
prominent representative of the attempt once more to rescue the 
plain style from its own plainness, to give it ornament, while not 
relaxing its general laws of almost compulsory balance and of a 
certain consecrated phraseology. He attained this effect, not like 
the one by a heavily classicised vocabulary and by exaggerated 
antithesis, nor like the other by accumulations of simile and metaphor 
and epexegetic statement. He was indeed not very unlike either, 
though he far surpassed both, in adorning his writing with set pieces 
of description; but the most characteristic part of his style does, 
not lie in these. It lies mainly in a peculiar roll of sentence, 
conducted throughout with a wavelike movement, and ending 
with a sound so arranged as to echo over the interval of sense 
and breath, till the next is well on its way. That this should be 
achieved without monotony is almost inconceivable ; and Gibbon has 
been accused of this fault, but not with much justice. Of his minor 
devices, the chief is a peculiar adaptation of the taste of the age for 
periphrases, which at once gives a more sounding phrase and sug- 
gests interesting associations to the mind. Constantius for him is 
" the son of Constantine," the rostnmi is *■ the tribunal which Cicero 
had so often ascended" — a device much, and too often with disastrous 
consequences, imitated since, but in him of admirable effect. 



628 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

The transition from Gibbon to Burke is interesting and not 
fortuitous. They were not merely contemporaries, but (though 
hardly friends) members of the same society; nor is it 
a mere accident that Burke was instrumental, by his 
financial reforms, in depriving Gibbon of his comfortable sinecure. 
They were the two Englishmen of their century who wrote the most 
gorgeous English, and the two men of their century (with Vico 
and Montesquieu) who had most sense of historical continuity, of 
that philosophic union of all times and countries, one aspect of which 
Burke has celebrated in brilliant words. But personally there could 
hardly be a greater unlikeness between any two men than between 
Cjibbon's sluggish nature, his intense self-centredness, not to say 
selfishness, his limited tastes and interests, and the enthusiastic 
manysidedness and impulsiveness of Burke. He was born at Dublin 
in 1729, and was educated in Ireland, graduating at Trinity College, 
Dublin, in 1748. He then went to London, exactly at the middle 
of the century, and kept terms at the Middle Temple, but was never 
called. We do not know much about his early manhood, but in 
the year 1756 he published two small but very notable treatises, 
A Vindication of Natural Society (following the style but ironically 
rebutting the argument of Bolingbroke) and A Philosophical Inquiry 
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the first, 
and for a long time the only, important and original "aesthetic essay 
in English. In this same year he married, and three years later he 
planned the well-known Annual Register, to which for the greater 
part of his life he was the largest contributor. He became private 
secretary, first to Gerard Hamilton, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, 
and then in 1765 to the Marquis of Rockingham. 

As this latter was Prime Minister, Burke was at once returned to 
Parliament, and continued till his death to make a very important, 
though a rather curious, figure in the State. In the merely partisan 
politics of the third quarter of the century he classed himself with 
the Wliigs, and as the American Revolution was brought about 
under a Tory administration, he supported it as heartily as he after- 
wards opposed the French. His speeches were never very effective 
as delivered, but they had a great effect when printed, and he 
constantly, at all times of his life, supported them by pamphlets which 
are almost undistinguishable from the speeches themselves in kind. 
The first of these to attract great attention was the Observations on 
the Present State of the Nation, \n 1769; but its follower, next year, 
Thoughts on the Present Discotitents, was superior, and still ranks 
among the very best of the class of writings in which admirable 
literary quality and great intellectual force are put at the service of 
party. After representing Wendover for nearly ten years, he sat for 



CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 629 

Bristol during six more, and many of his most important speeches 
and tracts were addressed to this constituency. Afterwards, losing 
Bristol owing to his support of Roman Catholic claims, lie sat for 
Malton. When the North ministry at last fell, Burke was Paymaster 
of the Forces, in 1782-83; he never held any other office. Opinions 
differ as to the reason which made him, in 1788, join, and indeed 
head, the crusade against Warren Hastings ; but this, whatever may be 
thought of it, gave splendid openings for his rhetoric. And the 
almost immediate outbreak of the French Revolution at last supplied 
his true subject. Although he had sometimes been led astray by 
party, Burke's sympathies were always with order, humanity, the 
distribution to every class in the state, and not to one only, be it 
highest or lowest, of its fair rights, and above all, that continuity of 
institutions and of historical development which has been glanced at 
above. The riot, the bloodshed, the gross unfairness to classes, 
however unfairly privileged before, and above all, the miscliievous 
and impossible breach with tlie whole history of the French nation, 
stimulated him not merely to the most strenuous action in Parliament, 
but to the publication of a series of works which, for combined 
literary merit and political effect, stand alone. The series began 
with the famous Reflections oit the F7-ench Revolution in 1790, and 
it was continued by A Letter to a Noble Lord (1790), An Appeal from 
the New to the Old Whigs (1791), Thoughts on French Affairs^ and 
the great Letters on a Regicide Peace, where in some cases no doubt 
Burke's passionate feeling and his wonderful command of language, 
not quite sufficiently restrained by a sense of humour, led him to 
exaggeration and bad taste, but which in the main are magnificent 
examples of his passionate love of justice and freedom. He died in 
1797. Burke's amiable, though both excitable and irritable, character 
and temper, his various conversational ability, and his other personal 
qualities, are well known from Boswell's Jolinson, Miss Burney's 
Diary, and other famous biographies and memoirs of the period. 
His work — though some of it excites the dislike of partisans in one 
way and some in the other — has, for this very reason, never wanted 
admirers of either party, while the fortunate impartiality of literature 
can admire the whole. 

The style of Burke is necessarily to be considered throughout as 
conditioned by oratory. For the last thirty years of his life this was 
inevitable ; and though in his earlier days he had not y{\% 
the same constant practice in speaking, his undoubted rhetorical 
selection of Bolingbroke as model predisposed him in the ^"P'^^'^^'^y- 
same way. In other words, he was first of all a rhetorician,^ and 

1 Using rhetoric in its best modern general sense as " the art of prose literature," 
but with the ancient specialising addition, " applied to the purpose of suasion." 



630 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TII-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

probably the greatest that modern times have ever produced. But 
his rhetoric always inclined much more to the written than to the 
spoken form, with results annoying perhaps to him at the time, 
but even to him satisfactory afterwards, and an inestimable gain to 
the world. The ordinary orator's and debater's work, if preserved 
at all, constantly loses value : there is no danger of Burke being 
forgotten while English literature exists. In the Vindication (which 
is better Bolingbroke than Bolingbroke himself) the sentences are as 
a rule short and crisp, arranged within succinct antithetic parallels, 
which seldom exceed a single pair of clauses. In the Sublime and 
Beautiful long and short sentences are more mixed, and there is 
even a distinct tendency to the former. And in this treatise we 
perceive, though not yet in anything like full development, the genuine 
properties of Burke's own style, which henceforward become more and 
more apparent. 

The most important of these, in so far as it is possible to 

enumerate them here, are as follows. First of all, and most 

distinctive, so much so as to have escaped no competent critic. 

Qualities ^^ ^ ^'^'"Y cuoous and, until his example made it imitable, 

of his style nearly unique faculty of buildins^ up an argument or a 

and method. ■ ^ ^ . ■ c 1^ ^, 

picture by a succession of complementary strokes, not 
added at haphazard, but growing out of and on to one another. No 
one has ever been such a master as was Burke of the best and 
grandest kind of the figure called, in the technical language of 
rhetoric. Amplification, and this, which in ordinary hands often, if 
not always, leads to tedious verbiage, is the direct implement by which 
he achieves his greatest effects. 

In the work which succeeds his entrance into political life, fresh 
devices of ordofinance appear, and the Thmtghts on the Present 
Discontents present them in very interesting exhibition. The piece 
may be said to consist of a certain number of specially laboured 
paragraphs, in which the arguments or pictures just spoken of are 
put as forcibly as the author can put them, and, as a rule, in a 
succession of shortish sentences, built up and glued together with 
the strength and flexibility of a newly-fashioned fishing-rod. In the 
intervals the texts thus given are turned about, commented on, justified, 
or discussed in detail, in a rhetoric for the most part, though not 
always, rather less serried, less evidently burnished, and in less 
full dress. And this general arrangement proceeds through the 
rest of his works, with, in the latest and most brilliant (those on the 
French Revolution), a less orderly arrangement, compensated by a 
greater rush of thought and rhetoric. 

In his ornaments, whether of idea or of imagery, Burke is better 
worth studying than almost any other English writer. In simile and 



THE GRAVER PROSE 6?i 



trope generally, he is, though often wonderfully brilliant, distinctly 
uncertain, quite untrustworthy in the direction of humour, and in 
some of his more forcible images apt even to be positively disgusting. 
On the other hand, his grandeur seldom falls into the grandiose, and 
the magical effect of more imaginative passages (of which the famous 
one about Marie Antoinette is only the stock example) has never 
been exceeded in political writing. Epigram he can occasionally 
manage with great effect, but it is not by any means so specially and 
definitely his weapon as imaginative argument, and the marshalling of 
vast masses of complicated detail into properly rhetorical battalions 
or (to alter the image) mosaic pictures of enduring beauty. The 
equally famous sentence-picture, in the Letter to a Noble Lord, of 
Windsor Castle, " girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval 
towers," is an instance, not excelled by any sentence in all the 
literatures from Greek to English, of words so used as to get out 
of them the very last possibility, the full triple effect — first of mere 
beauty of sound ; secondly, of conveying with the utmost force the 
immediate meaning and image intended ; and thirdly, of urging the 
intended argumentative application, not more by the general conduct 
of the sentence than by the very ornaments and accessories of the 
phrase. Only a great imagination would have been seized with this 
use of the inner and outer bailey and the keep of a Gothic fortress ; 
only a consummate facult}' of expression could have so arranged it 
as at once to make a perfect harmonic chord, a complete visual 
picture, and a forcible argument. The minor rhetoric, the suasive 
purpose, must be kept in view ; if it be left out the thing loses, and 
this is one of the points in which Burke is far below Browne, who 
has no need of purpose. But he is the king of his own business-like 
century in point of prose. 

Theology and philosophy proper provide us with lesser, though 
in some cases by no means little, men. The former, indeed, contrasts 
very remarkably and unfortunately, as literature, with the work of the 
preceding age. The Sherlocks in one half of the 
century, and Samuel Horsley (i 733-1806) in the other '^pSK'^ 
half, have a certain traditional reputation, sustained 
occasionally by praise from those who have perhaps no very wide 
acquaintance with the profane authors of the period. The Deist 
controversy produced, chiefly from the ranks of the Nonjurors, who 
included a disproportionate number of the most learned and 
able of tlie English clergy, some great controversialists, notably the 
redoubtable polemic Charles Leslie and the by no means unpractical 
mystic William Law. In Nonconformity and its fringes, the Wesleys 
and Doddridge were greater men at verse than at literary prose. 
Warburton earlier and Paley later may almost suffice for more 



632 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

detailed mention in this particular branch. So too the philosophers 
of the older kinds — Reid, Brown, Stewart — give little that is litera- 
ture after Berkeley and Hume, and in the newer sorts Adam Smith 
and Godwin may do duty as samples. For though no literary con- 
tempt is more unliterary than that so long and so widely entertained 
for the eighteenth century, this century does display a certain want 
of individual difference in the form of its writers. Their thought is 
often highly original, and their application of literary treatment still 
more so. But the qualities, for instance, which earned a place in 
literature for Sir William Blackstone (1723-80) and for Sir Joshua 
Reynolds (1723-92), men born in the same year with Adam Smith, 
were really literary. It is not for nothing, even from the mere 
bookish point of view, but of right as a man of letters, that Black- 
stone sits enthroned in the vast library of All Souls College. Yet 
the main interest of his Coinmentaries on the Laws of England 
(1765, sq^ for us, like the main interest of Sir Joshua's presiden- 
tial Discourses to the Royal Academy, lies in the application of a 
literary common form, at once easy and stately, to technical subjects. 
Earlier ^ such subjects, if treated at all, would have been treated 
more probably in Latin ; later experience makes it scarcely unjust 
to say that increase in technical precision has not always or 
often been accompanied, in the sciences at least, if not in the 
arts, by increase of literary quality. But still all eighteenth-cen- 
tury writers have a certain community, and must be dealt with rep- 
resentatively. 

William Warburton was a rather typical divine of the age, who, 
after perhaps occupying too high a position in it, has been unduly 
depreciated in this. He was an older man than most who have 
been mentioned in this chapter, and was born at New- 
ark in 1698. He went to no university, and at first 
adopted law as a profession, but was ordained in 1723. His famous 
Divine Legation of Moses, which would have been one of the most 
brilliant paradoxes in literature if the author had kept it down in 
size, and one of the most learned of works if he had attended a little 
more to accuracy, began to appear in 1738. Henceforward the 
prosperity of Warburton, who was accused by his numerous enemies 
of being as sycophantic in private relations as he was rough and 
rude in public controversy, was unbroken. An odd friendship with 
Pope gave him prominence in the world of belles lettres, his marriage 
with Gertrude Tucker, niece of Allen of Prior Park (the Allworthy 
of Fielding), supplied money, and a steady tide of professional 
advancement landed him in the bishoj^ric of Gloucester, which he 
held for twenty years, dying in 1779. Warburton just came short 
of being a great theologian and a great man of letters. His con- 



CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 633 

troversial manners cannot be defended, but we should probably have 
heard a good deal less of them if he had been on the unorthodox 
side. 

Something of the same character, with less arrogance, appears in 
William Prley, who was born at Peterborough in 1743, was educated 
at Giggleswick School and Christ's College, Cambridge, was Senior 
Wrangler in 1763, obtained a Fellowship, and then a 
succession of preferments in the Church. He died 
Archdeacon of Carlisle and Rector of Bishop Wearmouth in 1805. 
His Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), his Horce Paiilince 
(1790), his Evidences of Christianity (i 794), and his Natural Theology 
(1802), at once attained, long kept, and have by no means wholly 
lost, a great reputation. As an apologist and expositor, Paley has 
been accused of a too business-like and profit-and-loss view of 
religion ; but those who call him interested perhaps use an unfair 
presumption, and his popularity has no doubt suffered from his 
having served for generations as a pass-textbook in the University 
of Cambridge. As a philosopher in things divine and human, he has 
a little too much of the merely forensic competence of the advocate 
about him. But this same competence extends (it may be not in the 
most interesting manner) to his work as literature. Paley gets the 
full value out of the plain style, for purposes to which it is far better 
adapted than anything more imaginative could possibly be. His 
arguments, if far lower and less noble, are much more easily intelligible 
than Butler's ; his style is perfectly clear ; he sees his point and his 
method distinctly, and seldom or never fails to prove the one to the 
best of the other. 

Adam Smith, the first great political economist in English, and 
almost the founder of the study of that subject as understood in 
modern times, was born at Kirkcaldy in June 1723, and was thoroughly 
educated at his native place, Glasgow, and Oxford, q ■ u 

where he went as Snell Exhibitioner to Balliol. He was 
an only and a posthumous child, and read quietly at home or in 
Edinburgh till, in 1751, he was elected to the Glasgow Chair of 
Logic, from which he passed to that of Moral Philosophy. His 
TJieory of Moral Sentiments appeared in 1759, ^^ Inqtiijy into 
the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations not till seventeen 
years later, in 1776, the year of the death of Hume, Smith's greatest 
friend, and it would seem the greatest influence upon him. Smith 
lived in London for a time, and later at Edinburgh, where he had a 
Commissionership of Customs. He died in 1790. The far-reaching 
consequences of Smith's theories as to free trade do not here 
concern us ; it is sufficient that he possessed, and applied to two 
great subjects in not much short of perfection, that clear, rather 



634 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

colourless and passionless, but admirably business-like as well as 
artist-like, style which is the glory of the eighteenth century. 

There are others whom one would fain discuss, such as Abraham 
Tucker (1705-74), the author of the voluminous but fascinating 
Light of Nature Pursued (1765), a huge storehouse of thought that 
is not seldom original, put with constant vividness and much humour, 
though diffusely and without order. And the vulgar vigour of Thomas 
Paine (i 737-1809), a great influence directly on popular thought, and 
a greater through his disciple Cobbett, must at least be mentioned. 
But we can give space to but one more name. 

William Godwin, the author of Political J7istice, was born at 
Wisbeach in 1756, and spent most of his earlier years in the eastern 
counties. He was for a time a Nonconformist minister, but drifted 
from Christianity, took to literature, and did a great deal 
of early hackwork, much of it unidentified, and none of it 
now read. It was in 1793 that the Inquiry conceriiiug Political 
Justice appeared, and the author only escaped prosecution (which 
befell not a few of his friends of less anarchic principles) because it 
was (no doubt wisely) judged that a very large and expensive book, 
written in a style not in the least likely to appeal to the vulgar, was 
not dangerous. Next year appeared Caleb JVilliavis, in which some 
of the doctrines of Political Justice received illustration, but which 
attained great popularity, and has never lost some. In 1797 Godwin 
married Mary Wollstonecraft, herself a " she-philosopher," who died 
soon afterwards. He lived nearly forty years longer, marrying 
again, becoming Shelley's father-in-law, publishing, bookselling, and 
writing continually, but always an unprosperous man. He received 
a sinecure office when his Radical friends came into power after 
the first Reform Bill, and died in April 1836. 

Godwin is by far the most important instance, for tlie last quarter 

of the century, of the man-of-letters-of-all-work approaching, but not 

yet fully enlisted in, actual journalism, of whom we find the first and 

„. . greatest example in Dryden, and, during the middle 

His impor- o , ^ j ^ •> . ii ^ 

tance and of the eighteenth century itself, remarkable instances in 
position. Johnson and Goldsmith. He is also almost the last 
who does not avail himself, or avails himself only to a small extent, 
of the newspaper to spread his views ; and in this he differs from his 
contemporary Cobbett, who for this reason will not be noticed till 
the next Book. Godwin is essentially a prose-writer, and his 
style, though it has been over-praised, is of considerable merit. 
Although his exaggerated anarchism and determination to regard 
everything as an open question are absurd enough in principle and 
lead to the most unimaginable absurdities in detail, yet they give 
his thought always the appearance, and sometimes the reality, of 



CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 635 

freer play than had been enjoyed by any English writer' since Hobbes. 
His novels have been more than once referred to. His philosophical 
and critical writings are chiefly contained in the Political Justice (which 
he altered and made much tamer in subsequent editions), in the 
somewhat later Enquirer, a very interesting collection of essays, and 
in a second collection, published towards the extreme end of his life, 
called Thoughts on Man. 

His drama of Antonio, which produced an exquisitely character- 
istic piece from his friend Charles Lamb, has no merit, and his his- 
torical and biographical works, History of the Co7nmonwealth, Life of 
Chaucer, Lives of the Necromancers, are compilations, though, at least 
in the first case, compilations much above the average. It was God- 
win, more than any one else, who introduced the mischievous but 
popular practice of bolstering out history by describing at great length 
the places and scenes which his heroes might have seen, the trans- 
actions in which, being contemporary, they might have taken an 
interest, and the persons with whom they either were, or conceivably 
might have been, acquainted. In this, as in other things, he belonged 
to the class of " germinal " writers. And his influence on the early, 
although impermanent, creeds and tempers of the most brilliant young 
men of his day was quite extraordinary. 



CHAPTER V 

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 

The conundrum of the drama — Fading of eighteenth-century tragedy — Minor 
comic writers: the domestic play — Goldsmith — Sheridan — His three great 
pieces 

If the suddenness of the rise of the English drama, though some- 
times exaggerated, is still one of the most striking facts in literary 
history, the suddenness, and the enduring nature, of its collapse are 
„, hardly less curious. For rather less than a hundred 

Ine conun- - , r i • i 

drum of the and fifty years, from the eighth decade of the sixteenth 
^^"'^' century to the second of the eighteenth, there was no 
time, save that of the closing of the theatres under the Rebel- 
lion, when work at once of great literary merit and of acting value, 
according at least to the idea of the time, was not produced. For a 
good deal more than another hundred and fifty, from the second 
decade of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, only 
two dramatists have appeared who have combined very high literary 
with distinctly high acting value in their plays, and these two both 
appeared during the first half of the time. To add to the puzzle, the 
popularity and the profits of the theatre have steadily increased, and 
the touch of discredit which once attached to writing for the stage has 
all but entirely disappeared. No plausible guess at the solution of 
this problem, on any of the grounds of so-called scientific criticism, has 
ever been made except the concurrent rise of the novel, and this, 
though not exactly nugatory, is clearly insufficient. We have, in 
short, here one of the capital instances of that fact which communi- 
cates to the study of literature itself a vast proportion of its fascination 
and its value, the fiict of incalculableness. 

One of the signs of this change was a curious separation which 
appeared early in the eighteenth century, and has maintained itself 
more or less ever since, between the literary drama, which was 
sometimes acted, but never with any real acting success, and the 
acting drama, which, though not immediately abandoning (as some- 
times later) all pretensions to be literature, yet practically does 
not aim at being read at all. At every time from Johnson's to 

636 



CHAP. V EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 637 

Tennyson's, poets and men of letters, who were not to the manner 
born, have tried the stage. But with the exception (and hardly that) 
of the late Mr. Browning, there is not a single one of Fading of 
them whose dramatic work has kept any fame, or who is '^'ceiuury ' 
ever thought of as a dramatist. Young's Revenge, acted tragedy. 
1 72 1, connects itself rather with the older than with the newer 
school, and is perhaps the very last example of an acting tragedy of 
real literary merit, but it is to be feared that few even of those who 
have read the Niglit-Tho lights and the Universal Passion have 
read it. The dramas of Thomson are far worse, and far more utterly 
forgotten; hardly any edition of him for years has contained them. 
Johnson's Irene is a byword, not altogether justly perhaps, for it is a 
fine piece of writing ; and Mason's Elfrida and Caractaciis are 
chiefly known, even to students of eighteenth-century literature, 
because they make some figure in the letters of their author's faithful 
and too indulgent friend, Gray. Of the work of men like Mallet, 
Glover, and others, so little of any kind is retained by the general 
memory that their dramas can hardly be said to be in exceptional 
oblivion; but the gloom of this is never pierced even by these feeble 
gleams which faintly reveal "William and Margaret" and "Admiral 
Hosier's Ghost." A sort of affection, mingled with contempt, and 
connected with the universally known " My name is Norval," keeps 
in twilight rather than utter darkness the once famous Douglas (1754) 
of Home (i 724-1 808). But it is pretty certain that most audiences, 
and almost all modern readers, would be affected by it with the same 
sort oi foil rire as that which Thackeray, by a slight anachronism, 
ascribes to General Lambert and Mr. George Warrington at an early 
performance of the play. 

The fact is that the whole cast of eighteenth-century thought and 
style was unfavourable, and almost fatal, to the composition of tragedy 
that should be at once practicable and poetic. Its conventions, its 
artificial poetical diction, and its dread of anything irregular, could 
at the best have produced something of the Racinian kind, a kind to 
which the English genius is utterly recalcitrant, and which does not 
suit itself to the English theatre. Alternate tameness and rant 
accordingly disfigure it, though no philosophical explanation quite 
attains to explaining the ineflfable sham-tragic lingo which, from 
Rowe downwards, took firmer and ever firmer possession of the 
English stage, till it was finally driven therefrom, by literary satire and 
popular disgust, within living memory. 

Comedy, as is usually the case, was somewhat less unfortunate. 
To get tragic action adjusted to literary form requires not merely a 
rare talent in the playwright, but an atmosphere, an aura of recep- 
tiveness in the audience, which exists only at times few and far 



638 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTH-CENlURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

between. The problem of the comic writer is far simpler, and his 

atmosphere, though it varies in fineness and freshness, always exists. 

Minor comic During the eighteenth century especially the general 

writers: the tone of manners, and the clearly recognised divisions of 

omestic p ay. gQ(,jg|^y^ jg^j themselves to an easy adaptation of the 

perennial commonplaces of comedy. When the last minorities of the 

great comic school — Steele, Gibber, Mrs. Centlivre — ceased to write, 

the stage was by no means left bare of stuff, which generally showed 

familiarity with its own requirements and traditions, and which 

occasionally displayed tolerable literary form. 

There was indeed, between tragedy and comedy, and of the kind 
which, popular at the same time in France, was called, according 
as it inclined to one side or the other, tragedie bourgeoise or comedie 
lar»ioyantc^ a certain production during the time. Two or three 
pieces, the George Barnwell ^.nd Fatal Curiosity of Lillo (i 693-1 739) 
and the Gamester of Edward Moore, held the stage with some 
tenacity, and made a sort of lodgment in literary history, but they 
can hardly be called of much importance. Yet George Lillo, as a 
curiosity at least, and because of the constant, and sometimes excellent, 
fun, of which his chief play was long the subject, must always retain 
some interest. His editor,^ Johnson's friend and butt, Tom Davies, 
could find out very little about him, except that he " learned and 
practised the trade of a jeweller." His work is not extensive, but it 
is very representative. He adapted Pericles and Arden of Fever- 
sham, and spoilt both. His Silvia, or The Country Burial is an 
opera-bouffe of an incoherency which would be triumphant if it were 
intended. The Fatal Curiosity in verse and George Barnwell in 
prose (the latter, from the supposed usefulness of its moral to appren- 
tices, constantly acted) are the strangest muddles of broken, or sound 
but stiiT, decasyllabics (^Barnwell itself is full of the former), the 
impossible lingo above referred to, action more impossible still, and, 
notwithstanding all this, touches of humanity, good feeling, and 
genuine, though awkward, pathos. 

Comedy, besides the two great exceptions, was but a little 
better off, though a great deal was written. Charles Shadwell, 
apparently a nephew of " Og," wrote some lively plays, one of them. 
The Fair (2!'a/:er of Deal, anticipating Smollett in studying the sailor 
from life. Fielding, as has been said, before he found his pr*" 
vocation, did much for the stage, and in the middle and later days 
of the century there were many playwrights who came nearer to the 
union of theatrical and literary competence than any tragedian of 
their time — or ours. George Colman (1732-94), a Westminster boy,- 

1 2nd ed. 2 vols. London, 1810. 

2 To be distinguished from his son, George Colman the younger (1762-1836), 



CHAP. V EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 639 

manager of Covent Garden, was a very prolific, if not exactly a 
very original, dramatist, and his Clandestine Maj-riage {1766) is the 
least forgotten of more than a score of plays. Garrick had a hand in 
it, as he had in others, and he did some work of the kind indepen- 
dently. Arthur Murphy, the biographer of Fielding and the friend 
of Johnson, also wrote plays with great freedom, and T/ie Way to 
Keep Hint survives in much the same relation to literature as that of 
The Clandestine Marriage. The Suspicious Husband (1747) of 
Benjamin Hoadly, a clever son of the Arian Bishop, who did other 
dramatic work, half original, half adapted, belongs to the same class, 
as does the False Delicacy of Hugh Kelly. Farce and comic opera, 
the latter stimulated by the great success of Gay, kept also near to 
literature, and Fielding's Tom Thumb was kept in company by the 
ChrononhotontJiologos of Henry Carey, a son of Halifax and an ancestor 
of Kean, and author of the delightful " Sally in our Alley." Mrs. 
Cowley (1743-1809) produced some lively pieces, of which The 
Belle'^s Stratagem (1780) has best kept name and (sometimes) the 
stage. Macklin's Ma}i of the World (1764), Townley's High Life 
Below Stairs (1759), and several works, especially The Minor and 
The Mayor of Garrat of Samuel Foote, may join the catalogue. 
Towards the close of the century Richard Cumberland, a! rather 
curious person, and better known to literature as Sir Fretful Plagiary, 
but a scholar, a skilful playwright, and no contemptible man of letters, 
represented the sentimental side of drama, John O'Keefe the wilder 
farce, and Holcroft, the friend of Godwin, a rather powerful variety 
of what the French call drame. The West Indian of Cumberland, 
which appeared in 1771, O'Keefe's Agreeable Surprise, and Holcroft's 
Road to Ruin (1792) are their chief remembered things. 

Goldsmith and Sheridan stand far apart from these. Both, it 
will be observed, were Irishmen, like Farquhar, Charles Shadwell, 
Murphy, and O'Keefe. Goldsmith's dramas, as noted in the sketch of 
his life above, were the result of his later years. The ^ , , . , 

^. 7,*-i i-.i 1 Goldsmith. 

Good-natured Man has admirable scenes and passages 
and some good character, but in all respects it is far the inferior of 
She Stoops to Conquer. In this delightful play Goldsmith may have 
taken some of the incidents (as he is said to have taken the central 
one) from real life, and some of the characters from Steele {vide 
■*!pra, p. 535 ). But this is less than nothing. The bright, fantastic, 
yet not unreal atmosphere of whimsical incident, the gracious 
humanity of the characters generally, and the exquisite literary quality 
of the dialogue, compose such a thing as the English stage had not 
seen since it was reopened after the Restoration. The wit, if less 

like liim, hut in the next generation, a busy and clever playwright and comic 
miscellanist. His Hcir-at-Law {1797) is a notable piece. 



640 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTlI-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

volleyed and regular, was not inferior to Congreve's, the action was not 
really less probable, and while there was nothing mawkish about the 
sentiment (there was perhaps a little about that of The Good-iiaticred 
Alan), its sweet and healthy good-nature contrasts, in a fashion inex- 
pressibly agreeable, with the loveless license and the brutal ferocity of 
the Restoration drama. 

The fame of Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan in literature is far 

more exclusively dramatic, for his theatrical and rather brassy oratory 

holds little place in literary memory. He was born in Dublin in 175 1, 

^, ., and was the grandson of Swift's friend, Dr. Sheridan, 

Sneridan. , , . - . i x^ i • i r • 

a clergyman not much mierior to the Dean hmiseli in a 
certain reckless wit, though possessed of little or nothing of his 
friend's magnificent intellect. His second son, Richard Brinsley's 
father, was a teacher of elocution, and one of Dr. Johnson's associ- 
ates and butts. This man, whose dulness was declared by the 
dictator to be beyond the reach of nature, unassisted by art and by 
patient and careful effort, married Miss Frances Chamberlaine, who 
contributed a novel {Sidney BiddiilpJi) to the crop of fiction in the 
middle of the century. Sheridan himself was a Harrow boy, and 
attempted literary work very early. In 1773, at the age of twenty- 
two, he eloped from Bath, where his family were then living, with 
Elizabeth Linley, a very beautiful girl with an exquisite voice, which 
her husband very properly refused to allow her to use on the stage. 
But he himself turned to play-writing (which, indeed, he had 
attempted earlier), and in January 1775, when he was not four-and- 
twenty, produced at Covent Garden the famous farce-comedy of The 
Rivals, which at once (or almost at once) established his fame. He 
followed this up with the bad St. Patrick^s Day, and the better, 
though still hardly good, Duenna. Next year Sheridan, with some 
assistance from friends, bought first half and then the whole of the 
patent of Drury Lane, of which he became manager as well as 
owner. This provided him with an income, and ought to have pro- 
vided him with an ample one for the remainder of his life, but his 
whole money affairs, from the way in which he found the means to 
buy the theatre onward, are much of a mystery. 

In 1780 he entered Parliament, attached himself to the Whig 
Opposition, and, rather later, became very intimate with the Prince of 
Wales. He had office under the Rockingham ministry and the Coali- 
tion, and attracted great attention by eifective but meretricious speeches 
against Warren Hastings. He was faithful to the extremer Whigs, 
and took the opposite side to Burke (whom he had previously 
followed) in regard 4o the French Revolution. In 1795, his wife 
having died some years earlier, he married again ; and he survived 
till 1 81 6, when he died with bailifts in his house. 



CHAP. V EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 641 

An extravagant hyperbole of Byron's as to the relative excellence of 
Sheridan's plays has perhaps done him some harm, but his three 
best pieces are of extraordinary merit. They were all 
produced between 1775 and 1779; each is a master- great pieces, 
piece in its kind, and the kinds are not identical. Tlie 
Rivals is artificial comedy, inclining on one side to farce, and, in 
the parts of Falkland and Julia, to the sentimental. But it is, on its 
own rather artificial plan, constructed with remarkable skill and tight- 
ness ; and the characters of Sir Anthony Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, 
Sir Lucius O'Trigger, and Bob Acres, with almost all the rest, combine 
fun with at least theatrical verisimilitude in a very rare way. Indeed, 
Sir Anthony and Mrs. Malaprop, though heightened from life, can 
hardly be said to be false to it, and though in the other pair the 
license of dramatic exaggeration is pushed to its farthest, it is not 
exceeded. The effect could not have been produced without the 
sparkling dialogue, but this alone could not have given it. 

The School for Scandal flies higher, but not quite so steadily. 
Pedants of construction fall more foul of it, and even those who do 
not accept their standards must admit that the characters are less 
uniformly alive. But they, like the play generally, aim higher ; it is 
no longer artificial comedy with stock personages, but a great comic 
castigation of manners that is attempted. In The Rivals Sheridan 
had vied with Vanbrugh and had beaten him ; in The School for 
Scandal he challenges Moliere, and is hardly beaten except in a 
certain universality. As for his third masterpiece. The Critic, it is 
simply a farce in excelsis, designedly extravagant and chaotic, but all 
the more successful. The mock-play is admittedly almost, if not quite, 
the best thing of the kind, and the by-play of Sneer, Puff, Dangle, 
and the immortal Sir Fretful Plagiary requires none of the illegiti- 
mate attraction of identification with real personages to give it zest. 
The Critic forms with The Rehearsal and The Rovers a triad of 
which English literature may well be proud. It is difficult, allowing 
for the scale of each, to choose between the three, but in variety and 
reach The Critic may be allowed frankly to carry it. 

Of the state of things in drama which followed Sheridan's time, 
and, as some hold, has lasted without much change to the present 
day, Joanna Baillie (i 762-1 851), whose life stretched from a few years 
past the middle of the eighteenth century to a few after the middle 
of the nineteenth, is an interesting illustration. She had some poetic 
faculty; but her Plays on the Passions (1768 and later) and others, 
though admired at the time, and sometimes acted, are neither great 
drama nor great literature, the author never seeming quite to know 
whether she is writing for the theatre or the study, and not producing 
the best things for either. 



CHAPTER VI 

MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 

The letter-writers — Lady Mary — Chesterfield — Horace Walpole — 
" Junius " — Bosvvell 

The heading of this chapter is not a mere capitulation to 
difficulties. Very little is gained by sorting out authors too exactly 
into divisions and compartments, and something would be lost by 
omitting to indicate within the classification two distinct features 
of our eighteenth-century literature — the constant divergence and 
diversion of literary energy into new directions and efforts, and the 
increase of the practice of writing for amusement merely. Some of 
the most celebrated books of the century were never intended for 
publication at all — Lord Chesterfield's Letters certainly were not, 
though we cannot be so sure about those of Horace Walpole and 
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Moreover, the diffusion of reading, the 
removal of the censorship of the press, and the mitigation of the legal 
tribulations to which authors and publishers were liable, encouraged 
the production of books of all kinds. 

The three writers named in the last paragraph themselves form a 
very interesting trio from many points of view. They as letter- 
writers, like Pepys and Evelyn earlier as diarists, supply the chief 
examples in English of that memoir-literature in which 
writers^"^' our language is, as compared with French, rather 
poor, but which in their case, as in a few others, can very 
well hold up its head. 

The lady who bears in English literature the courtesy title of 

" Lady Mary," without any necessary addition, was, oddly enough, 

connected with Evelyn by blood and with Pepys by marriage. Her 

, , ,, maiden name was Pierrepont, and she was dau£;hter of 

Lady Mary. 

the Earl of Kingston, a Whig noble, who was suc- 
cessively raised to the Marquisate of Dorchester and the Dukedom 
of Kingston. Her extreme beauty as a child — beauty which 
continued till early middle life at least — made her the heroine 

642 



CHAP. VI MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 643 

of a well-known anecdote to the effect that she was, when eight years 
old, not merely toasted at, but introduced to, the Kit-Cat Club of 
Whigs and wits by her father. She seems to have been born in 
1689, and at twenty-two eloped with Edward Wortley or Wortley 
Montagu, grandson of Pepys' relation and patron, the first Earl of 
Sandwich, and heir to the great Yorkshire estate of Wharncliffe. 
When George I. came to the throne iVIr. Wortley Montagu had 
preferment, and in 1716 he went as ambassador to Constantinople, 
his wife accompanying him, and so obtaining the materials for her 
best-known, though not best, Letters. When she came back she 
brought inoculation with her — there is at least one story that the loss 
of her own beauty was due to smallpox — and made it fashionable in 
England. She lived at home for nearly the whole of the third and 
fourth decades of the century, became, for what cause is uncertain, an 
object of hate from Pope as furious as his admiration had formerly 
been fantastic, and in 1739 went abroad without her husband, with 
whom, however, she never seems to have had the least quarrel. She 
lived, in Italy chiefly, for some twenty years more, and returned to 
England in 1761 after her husband's death, to die herself of cancer 
next year. She had two children — a daughter, who married the 
famous Lord Bute, and a very worthless and probably insane son. 

Lady Mary might probably have attained distinction in several 
different kinds of literature.^ She was actually, and rather to her own 
misfortune, a very deft writer of light satirical verse, while much no 
doubt that she did not write was attributed to her. Her Town 
Eclogues are distinctly good ; but tlie best thing she ever did in this 
kind is the famous piece beginning — 



and ending - 



Good madam, when ladies are willing 
A man can but look like a fool, 

The fruit that can fall without shaking 
Is rather too mellow for me. 



Her prose work is much more extensive and important. It consists 
of a large collection of Letters extending over some fifty years. 
There are some difficulties about their text and first publication, and the 
authenticity of some has been doubted, perhaps with not much justice. 
They fall generally into four divisions — those before the Turkish journey, 
containing a very odd picture of a courtship and some lively sketches 
of George I.'s household; the Turkish and other continental letters 
of the first sojourn abroad, which are very lively and interesting, but 
a trifle artificial ; those of the middle period, few in comparison and 

"^Letters, etc., ed. Moy Thomas, 2 vols. London, i85i. 



644 MIDDLE AND LATER iSlH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

too often distinguished by the ill-nature of a Queen of Society whose 
charms and power are passing ; and those of the last, mainly written 
to Lady Bute, and the most interesting of the whole, alternating as 
they do between curious pictures of Italian country life, the Jacobite 
society of Avignon, the tracasseries of the English colony at Venice 
and the like on the one hand, and on the other full, shrewd, and 
invaluable criticisms of the new novels of the day from Fielding 
and Smollett downwards. There is a certain hardness about Lady 
Mary, and she exhibits to the very full the indifference of her age to 
all high things in religion, poetry, and elsewhere. But her clever- 
ness is astonishing, and one can see, if only by glimpses, that she 
must have been lovable once. 

Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, the author of 
the most famous and widely known, if not the most voluminous or best, 
letters in English, was a few years younger than Lady Mary, having 
been born in September 1694. He too was of a Whig 
' family, and went to the Whig University, Cambridge. 
After this experience and its completion of foreign travel (by which 
he profited a good deal more than most of the English tutor- 
conducted youths upon whom both he and Lady Mary are so severe), 
he sat in the House of Commons for ten years, until his succession to 
the earldom in 1726. For all his devotion to "the Graces," his 
gambling, and his other condescensions to the ways of his time, 
Chesterfield was a man of political ability, which did not fall far short 
of positive statesmanship, and he distinguished himself in various 
offices, the most important of which was the Lord Lieutenancy of 
Ireland. But he became deaf, and perhaps disgusted, and retired 
from active public life about 1748. He had written earlier in the 
Craftsmati. as he wrote later in the IVorld. A few other minor 
things, "Characters " and the like, show the great literary ability and 
the thorough knowledge of part of human nature which he possessed. 
But his literary fame was derived from a publication which (unlike- 
some letter-writers) he never intended, that of his correspondence with 
his illegitimate son Philip Stanhoj)e, printed by that son's widow. He 
also wrote a good many other letters, and within recent years a fresh 
batch of advices to the young, addressed this time to his godson and 
successor in the title, was added by the late Earl of Carnarvon. 

The hardness which has been noted in Lady Mary appears to a 
greater extent, as was natural, in Chesterfield ; and though Johnson's 
undying grudge exaggerated the immorality which accompanies it, 
that immorality certainly exists. But as a letter-writer, in his few 
excursions into the essay, and in such other literary amusements as 
he permitted himself, he stands very high, and the somewhat artificial 
character of his etiquette, the wholly artificial character of his standards 



ciiAf. VI MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 645 

of literary, aesthetic, and other judgment, ought not to obscure his 
excellence. Devoted as he was to French, speaking and writing it 
as easily as he did English, he never Gallicised his style as Horace 
Walpole did, nor fell into incorrectnesses as did sometimes Lady Mary. 
The singular ease with which, not in the least ostentatiously conde- 
scending to them, he adjusts his writing to his boy correspondents is 
only one function of his literary adaptability. Nor is it by any means 
to be forgotten that Chesterfield's subjects are extremely various, and are 
handled with equal information and mother-wit. He was not exactly 
a scholar, but he was a man widely and well read, and the shrewd- 
ness of his judgment on men and things was only conditioned by that 
obstinate refusal even to entertain any enthusiasm, anything high- 
strung in ethics, aesthetics, religion, and other things, which was 
characteristic of his age. Had it not been for Chesterfield we should 
have wanted many lively pictures of society, manner, and travel ; 
but we should also have wanted our best English illustration of a 
saying of his time, though not of his — ''If there were no God, it 
would be necessary to create one." 

Lady Mary and Lord Chesterfield were persons of extreme and 
even talent, which never quite reached genius. In the third of the 
great trio of letter-writers we find a curious mixture of something by 
no means unlike genius, and of most undoubted origi- 
nality, with the qualities and the limitations of a very waipole. 
decided fribble and coxcomb. Horace Walpole ranked 
as the third son of the great Sir Robert, to whose late and not fortunate 
title of Earl of Orford he — himself very late in his life — succeeded. 
He was born in London in September 1717, and after passing through 
Eton and Cambridge, travelled, as noted above, in Italy with Gray. 
After his return to England, and for long afterwards, he sat in Parlia- 
ment, but he had no political ability, and only partisan political 
interests. Being comfortably provided for by office and bequest, he 
was able to live very much as he pleased, and soon established him- 
self at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, where he built, affecting 
" the Gothick taste " more well than wisely, his famous villa. After 
a time he even set up a press there, and throughout his long life he 
maintained not merely a constant interest in literature, but a very 
considerable literary production. Besides an enormous number of 
letters, never yet fully collected, he wrote in the World, produced 
the wonderfully original, if not wonderfully good, novel of The Castle 
of Otranto, and the strong, though again not good, tragedy of The 
Mysterious Mother, compiled Anecdotes of Painting, Catalogues of 
Engravers, Catalogues of Royal and Noble Authors, Historic Doubts, 
and other things, besides editing or reprinting Grammont, Lord 
Herbert of Cherbury, and much else. 



646 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

In literary history Horace Walpole has no small importance as 
the author of The Castle of Otraiito, and is not quite devoid of it as 
the author of The Mysterious Mother. But to the reader, and not 
the mere reader only, his Letters give him far greater interest. Their 
enormous bulk is not marred, as is the case in some other collections, 
by a constant repetition of the same subject to different correspond- 
ents, and the variety of the subjects themselves is altogether extraor- 
dinary. For part of the politics, much of the personal history, and 
almost all the social gossip, chit-chat, manners, and what not of the 
middle of the eighteenth century, Walpole is an authority to be 
trusted indeed with caution (for he was extremely spiteful, and by no 
means scrupulous), but to be enjoyed almost without alloy or satiety. 
No matter whether it be the execution of the Jacobite lords, or a 
frolic to the public gardens with madcap ladies, who insist on cook- 
ing chickens in a china dish which is expected every minute to fly 
about their ears, whether it be bric-a-brac or scandal, Walpole con- 
trives to be always amusing and never silly, though he may sometimes 
be not wholly sensible. And it is only fair to admit that the intrinsic 
charm of his matter is very much helped by the peculiarities of his 
style. It is not by any means wholly natural — it would not have 
suited the hour or the man if it had been ; but its affectation and 
its frippery are exactly suited to the part which the writer wished to 
play, and seldom out of keeping with the matters he had to handle. 
There is plenty of ill-nature in Walpole, some snobbery, a good many 
other failings positive and negative ; but there is also genius, and 
the genius is of a distinctly literary kind. 

Of minor memoir- and letter-writers it would be possible to name 
not a few, from Lord Hervey, the friend of Lady Mary and the 
enemy of Pope, downwards ; but hardly any absolutely demands 
, . „ mention. There is, however, one writer who, from the 
mystery attending his person at least as much as from 
the excellence of his writings, has attracted in the past, and still to 
some extent attracts, a leather disproportionate attention, and this is 
the author of the Letters of Jienius. Into the personal and identify- 
ing question there is not any need to enter deeply here, for it has no 
literary consequence, if indeed it has any consequence at all, and, 
as in all much-debated problems, the heat which the discussion of it 
excites is sometimes in inverse proportion to the importance of the 
decision. It is enough to say that the series of letters signed 
"Junius," and published by Woodfall, who himself was ignorant of 
the identity of liis contributor, appeared in the Public Advertiser 
from January 1769 to a period some three years later. They 
attacked the king, the ministers (especially the Duke of Grafton), 
and a great number of things and persons connected with the admin- 



CHAr. VI MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 647 

istration of the day. They showed inside knowledge of official matters. 
They were, though repeatedly printed, never acknowledged by any 
one. They were attributed to Edmund Burke, to his brother Richard, 
to Lord Temple, to Lord George Sackville, to Lord Shelburne, to 
Barre, to Wilkes, to Home Tooke, to Glover, to Wedderburn, to 
Gerard Hamilton, but especially to Philip, afterwards Sir Philip, 
Francis, an Irishman, the son of the translator of Horace, who was 
born in Dublin in 1740, entered the Civil Service, held a position in 
the War Office, was sent out to India as a Member of Council, became 
a bitter opponent of Warren Hastings, and fought a duel with him, 
returned, sat in Parliament on the extremer Whig side, and died in 
181 8.1 The evidence connecting Francis with "Junius," though 
entirely circumstantial, and certainly not decisive even as such, is 
very strong, and at any rate far outweighs that advanced in favour of 
any other candidate for a rather bad eminence. 

For the Letters of Jiamis, while they display some of the worst 
qualities of the human soul — arrogance, spite, jealousy, and hardly 
one really good or great quality, inasmuch as their very denunciation 
of abuses is evidently but personal, or at best partisan — are far less 
intellectually and artistically remarkable than it used to be, and some- 
times still is, the fashion to represent them. The immense impor- 
tance attaching to oratory in the eighteenth century — when a single 
fortunate speech might bring a man office, wealth, hereditary dignity, 
and almost everything most coveted — together with a rhetorical 
tradition starting at least from Bolingbroke, and possibly from Hali- 
fax, had made a certain rather stereotyped and very conventional 
fashion of writing the subject of constant practice and of not infre- 
quent attainment. Burke is the great example of this practice, 
carried beyond convention, beyond rhetoric, beyond even eloquence, 
into great permanent literature. "Junius" is the chief example of it 
in its lower and quite undivine form. An affectation of exaggerated 
moral indignation, claptrap rhetorical interrogations, the use, clever 
enough if it were not so constant, of balanced antitheses, a very good 
ear for some, though by no means many, cadences and rhythms, some 
ingenuity in trope and metaphor, and a cunning adaptation of that 
trick of specialising with proper names with which Lord Macaulay 
has surfeited readers for the last half-century — these, though by no 
means all, are the chief features of the Junian method. But the 
effect is not in the least marmoreal, as Burke's is. It has, on the 
contrary, two qualities of the usual imitation of marble — it is plaster 

1 Still other claimants of less mark, one H. M. Boyd, one Rosenhagen, one 
Greatrakes, are mentioned by Wraxall {Ottm Time, i. p. 447,5^.). The "anti- 
Franciscan" arguments have been recently urged once more in the Athencsum by 
Mr. Fraser Rae. 



648 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LFFERATURE bk. ix 

and it is hollow. As a man of letters the author has done well a 
conventional exercise not worth the doing. As a man of morals he 
has put talents great, if not consummate, at the service at best of 
party, at worst of self. 

Far different is the history and far higher the merits of a yet 
more famous book, some twenty years younger, which also belongs 
of right to this Book and chapter. James Boswell, younger of 
Auchinleck, was born in Edinburgh in October 1740. 
He was the heir to an old family and a good estate, had 
talents of various kinds, wrote a popular Account of Corsica in 1768, 
and in his later years (he died in 1795) made some bid both for 
political and professional success. But he is for posterity nothing 
but the author of the Life of D7\ foJmson, published in 1791, with its 
earlier complement, the Tour to the Hebrides (1773). Boswell had 
devoted himself to Johnson as early as 1763, and for the remaining 
twenty-one years of the sage's life, though not very frequently or for 
very long periods in his company, was in pretty constant communica- 
tion with him, was (though Johnson could not avoid rough treatment 
of his follies) on the whole tolerated by the great man as he tolerated 
no one else, took infinite pains both before and after his idoPs death 
to procure all the information he could about him, and wove it into 
one of the most extraordinary books in literature — a book which from 
the day of its appearance to the present has been quarrelled over, 
accounted for in a score of different ways, given up as a hopeless 
enigma, but always read and rejoiced in. Those who like Boswell at 
first like him ever better ; those who do not like him at first (such 
cases have been known) with rare exceptions become converted to 
him afterwards. Some of his greatest admirers think him a whole 
fool ; nearly every one thinks him in large part foolish. Except 
Pepys, whom in not a few ways he resembled, there is perhaps no 
author whom we regard with so much affection mixed with so much 
contempt. And he has written a biography of very great size, which 
is all but universally allowed to be the best, with but one rival, in 
literature, and wliich some hold to be best with no rival at all. 

Of many other writers, we may select Gilbert White of Selborne 
(1720-1793) and William Gilpin of Boldre (1724-1804), because 
of the immense influence upon literature of the tendency which the 
N'atural History of Selborne (1789) and the series of "Picturesque 
Tours" ( The Highlands, 1778; The Wye, 1782; The Lakes, 1789; 
luirest Scetiety, 1791 ; The West of England, 1798) expressed. 
White's volume is a plain but vivid record of observation of nature ; 
Gilpin's books, a little more florid in style, are elaborately illustrated 
in aquatint. Both exemplify the craving to get close to nature, the 
determination to " count the streaks of the tulip " and value its hues. 



INTERCHAPTER IX 

The actual contents of the foregoing Book require less classification 
and comment of the specific kind than has been the case with any of 
those preceding it ; but their general character, taken into conjunc- 
tion with that of Book VIII., and the lessons of the change to which 
we are now coming, require some larger notice. For we are once 
more approaching one (and up to the present day the last) of the 
great turning-points of English literature — a turning-point of a defi- 
niteness and moment which had been only twice equalled before, 
at the beginning of the Elizabethan great time with Lyly and Spenser, 
and at the Restoration. The Augustan ages, with their continuation 
in the mid- and later-eighteenth century, were closed in fact, though 
not in general opinion, by the publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 
1798. But they had had notice of closing before. What these 
notices were we must now briefly indicate, concluding with a short 
summary and criticism of the main aspects of literature from the rise 
of Dryden to the death of Burke. 

The agencies of the change admit, of course, of very different 
appreciation, but by both in number and order the following summary 
will probably be not far from doing justice to them. Almost imme- 
diately after the beginning of the century there began also a certain 
indefinite but very perceptible " harking back " to older literature in 
various forms — the antiquarian efforts of Oldys, the editorial labours 
of Theobald, the collection of ballads, English and Scottish, as 
definite curiosities. The poetical work of Thomson had more effect 
in the same direction than its author knew, or in any probability 
intended, and its own suffusion with conventionality did little harm 
and (by rendering it more palatable to the wits and the town) some 
good. A little later still the same mixture of conventional externals 
and Romantic spirit meets us in the scanty but intense poetical work 
of Collins, in the almo.st as scanty and less intense, but curiously 
anxious and " questing," poetical work of Gray, and in the wide, 
various, and far-reaching, though insufficiently productive, literary 
studies of the latter. The Thomsonian mixture is more perceptible 
still in Shenstone, because this latter, though an undeveloped and 

649 



650 INIIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE hk. 

irregular, is a decidedly germinal critic, whereas in Thomson there is 
little sign of the critical spirit. And then, at or about the year 1760, 
there meets us a whole group of important symptoms, or stimulants, or 
both — the Castle of Otranto, Percy's Rcliqucs. Macpherson's Ossiaii — 
all expressing, and the two last at any rate powerfully helping on, 
the complete Romantic revival itself — a revival further expressed in 
curiously different ways a few years later by the rich work of 
Chatterton and the poor work of Beattie.^ 

Opinions may differ as to the cause of the still further postpone- 
ment of the Revival itself, and some will probably still take refuge in 
the apparently pusillanimous, but certainly prudent, and perhaps not 
really unsound, doctrine of "the Hour and the Man." But it does 
not seem quite foolish, or even very fanciful, to attribute to the 
enormous literary influence of Johnson an effect in keeping back the 
growth which (though such was very far from being his wish) had 
the beneficent effect of the "pinching" process so well known to 
gardeners. That it was beneficent there can be no doubt, and more 
than one of the examples just referred to shows this amply. The 
general literary mind was as yet not nearly enough educated in the 
way in which it wished to go. As Percy, as Macpherson, as Chatter- 
ton, as Beattie showed in their different fashions, as was shown still 
more by the deplorable creatures of the last twenty years, the aims, 
the ideas, the conceptions of the new school were quite vague and 
very ill-informed. Only Gray really knew something of mediaeval 
English literature, and modern literature other than English ; and 
Gray's knowledge was divorced from power, further enfeebled (it 
may be suspected) by a divided allegiance, and rather sicklied o'er 
with its own learning. The robuster labours of the Wartons, the 
Tyrwhitts, the Ritsons, were needed to supply the actual stuff of 
knowledge, as well as the positive genius of a new generation to 
supply the power of using it. That powerful assistance was given by 

iQf especial interest in regard to this matter are the Letters on Chivalry and 
Romance of Richard (not then Bishop) Hurd, published in 1762, before the 
Reliqiics, or the Castle of Otranto, or all but the first-fruits of Ossian. Hurd 
(1720-1808), successively Bishop of Lichfield and Worcester, was in character 
rather a pompous /rt/-zYV/«, and injured his reputation by making himself a sort of 
bandog to Warburton. But his writings, at least the critical part of them, can be 
spoken of with contempt by no good critic who has read them. They are 
gropings rather than discoveries, marred by imperfect knowledge, by supercilious- 
ness, by mistaken attempts to adjust Classical methods to Romantic matter. But 
the man who in 1762 recognised that there was a Romantic Unity, distinct from the 
Aristotelian, was a critic if ever there was one. His Dissertations on Poetry are 
less good than the Letters, and his Commenta'ies on Horace are "old style," with 
some modern touches. But his Dialoo-iies probably gave Landor no slight hint 
for the Imaginary Conversations ; and any one who will compare Hurd with Blair 
will soon see which is on the right side in literature. 



INTERCHAPTER IX 651 



two (for Blake exercised none, and Crabbe very little till later) of the 
four chief poets c. 1780 there can be no doubt. Both Cowper and 
Burns deepened the tendency to get out of the library and into the 
fields and woods, to see directly and not through borrowed glasses, 
to express directly and not in phrase of common form ; while to 
some, at least, the mere alterative powers of Burns's dialect must 
always hold a high place in the calculation. The German influence 
of the very latest years of the century was also real, though much 
more alloyed, and working by no means wholly for good ; while that 
of the French Revolution, though it may easily be exaggerated, can 
no more be denied than can the influence of the three great changes 
at the junction of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the literary 
growths which followed them. It is not for nothing that the three 
leaders of the new movement were all deeply influenced by Godwin, 
tliat Godwin's philosophy shot into crystal at the touch of the 
Revolution itself, and that the essence of it was anarchy, in the sense 
of refusing accejDted conventions, in everything. All three were to 
recoil from this eventually, but the two greatest of them never allowed 
the recoil to aftect their literary position. They struck — ^ Wordsworth 
rather blindly and instinctively, Coleridge with reason — at the whole 
convention of the period immediately behind them, and the literary 
practice of a hundred years has followed up their blows. 

What, then, was this convention, and to what does the crusade 
against it amount ? It is not a mere idle play on words to answer the 
first part of this question that the convention was Convention itself. 

Like most long-dominant creeds, this was not the work of a single 
man, or the definite and conscious expression of the ojiinions of a 
single mind. The four greatest exponents of it, Dryden, Addison, 
Pope, and Johnson, undoubtedly brought it about, but it may be 
questioned whether any but the last — -perhaps whether even he — was 
a consciously convinced apostle of it. Dryden, its founder, was an 
explorer, an experimenter, to his very death-day ; his theories were in 
a constant condition of readjustment and flux, and they, as well as 
his practice, included a great deal of stuff which was not part of the 
classical-conventional creed at all, and suited it but oddly. In 
adopting and carrying out the demands of his time for a clearer, 
plainer, more business-like style in verse and prose, he was induced, 
as a makeshift, to take up with the French " classical " theories to a 
certain extent, but this was chiefly in consequence of his curious pref- 
erence for adaptation over creation. His immediate successors, the 
two great lawgivers of the eighteenth century in verse and prose 
respectively, were men excellently suited for their own purposes, but 
rather unfortunately devised for the general good of literature. 
Addison was a man of good but rather partial reading, with an intellect 



652 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix 

neat rather than powerful, a hater of excess, but rather tolerant of de- 
fect and littleness. Pope was one of the very greatest artists that ever 
existed, but an artist pure and simple, a man of no learning, of no ^ 
extensive intellect, and greater in his art than his art among others. 
Again, Johnson's chief characteristic was a conservatism just too 
obstinately tinged with mere common sense, a determination, a little 
too dogged and narrow, to adorn the Sparta he had got, and no other 
literary city. And so, the general taste assisting, a really haphazard, 
though seemingly orderly, convention of conventions came into exist- 
ence. Men praised " correctness " without having any more real 
standard of it than a misunderstanding by Pope of Boileau's mis- 
understanding of Horace, who had himself misunderstood the Greeks. 
They turned, instinctively rather than in theory, away from wild 
nature to civilised manners. They laughed at the Middle Ages, 
and filled their poems with personifications as unreal as those of 
the Romance of tJie Rose, and infinitely less attractive. They gen- 
eralised and abstracted ; they refused " to count the streaks of the 
tulip" — till their written imagery had the life and the outline and 
the colour of a mathematical diagram. P'eeling — and feeling rightly 
— that prose ought not to be like poetry, they consecrated one par- 
ticular limited kind of poetic diction as the proper uniform of verse, 
and (despite isolated attempts at truer metrical theory as well as 
practice) they clung to the separated couplet as the serious metre 
beyond which there was no salvation. 

All this, to borrow a famous phrase of Carlyle's, the new age " [not 
always] modestl}', but peremptorily and irrevocably denied." It was 
right in the denial, not so right in undervaluing what, in pursuance 
or in spite of its theories, the period from 1660 to 1798 had 
given. 

For mighty things had been given and done. In the opening 
portion the work of Dryden is so great that only the greatest (and 
very few of them) can be put above him in art, not many even in 
literary spirit, hardly one in craftsmanship. And this high peak is 
followed in the chain by the volcanic magnificence of Swift, the 
graceful outlines of Addison and Pope, the massive strength of John- 
son and Gibbon, the varied and effective sky-line of Burke — with con- 
siderable minor heights to fill in tlie range. The eighteenth century 
by itself had created the novel and practically created the literary his- 
tory ; it had put the essay into general circulation ; it had hit off various 
forms, and an abundant supply, of lighter verse ; it had added largely 
to the literature of philosophy. Above all, it had shaped the form of 
English prose-of-all-work, the one thing that remained to be done at 
its opening. When an age has done so much, it seems somewhat 
illiberal to reproach it with not doing more. 



CHAPTER II 

THE NOVEL — SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 

The novel, c. 1S00-1814 — Scott's adoption of it — I Tizt'dv/tj and its successors — His 
general achievement — Miss Austen — Miss Edgeworth — Miss Ferrier — Gait — 
Ainsworth and James — Lord Beaconsfield — Bulwer-Lytton — Others: Lock- 
hart — Peacock — Lever — Marryat — Michael Scott — Hook and others 

The poetical work of Scott had a great influence on his own time, 
and he was no mean contributor to that critical and miscellaneous 
literature which has been so prominent in the present century. But 
there can be no doubt that his main importance in 
literary history comes from his position in the history of ^i^Soa^iS^u"^' 
the novel, and his accomplishment in more than one 
kind of it. As will have been partly seen from the foregoing pages, 
the novel had been making way steadily as a popular form of literature 
for something like a century. It had produced great practitioners, 
and, what was even more to the purpose, it had gradually enlisted, 
more and more, the reading part of the nation. Already, in the 
middle eighteenth century, we find Gray avowing his partiality for 
French novels, and Lady Mary devouring English ones in her distant 
Italian home. The circulating library came by degrees to help its 
diftusion, and the prevalence of the Terror School and the much- 
abused " Minerva Press," though neither produced much good litera- 
ture, helped in both cases to create demand and furnish supply. 

But the novel, despite the great names of Fielding, Smollett, and 
others, and the rewards which, as in the case of Miss Burney, were 
now evidently ready for any one who could hit the popular taste in 
it. still ranked low, and not altogether undeservedly. It was too apt 
to grovel and maunder in sentiment, or to shriek and gibber in extrav- 
agances ; no second Fielding had arisen to infuse universality into 
it, and, at the same time, to keep it close to contemporary life ; and 
though the historical variety of it, after repeated attempts and failures, 
was becoming popular, no one had in the least succeeded therein. 
Even a man of such power as Godwin, a professed historian after his 

677 



67S THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

kind, had not succeeded in communicating the least verisimiHtude to 
SL Leon, while Mrs. Radcliffe, in The Mysteries of Udolpho, had 
talked about " the opera " in the Paris of the religious wars. The 
attempt to defend such things by the anacliroijisms of Shakespeare 
is quite inept ; for, in the first place, Shakespeare would not have 
made Hector quote Aristotle, or have introduced Bohemia to the 
sea, if he had been writing about 1800; and, in the second place, 
the charms which make us entirely indifferent to these things in 
Shakespeare are not present in Godwin and Anne Ward. 

Scott's immediate inducement to turn from verse to prose romance 
was undoubtedly the popularity of Byron, with his own consequent 
loss of public favour ; but it is not to be believed that the change 

would in any case have been long postponed. The 
adoption ofit. gi'cat attraction of verse is beyond all doubt, though 

it be varied in a hundred ways, the attraction of the 
unforeseen ; and it is more astonishing that even Scott's genius con- 
trived to keep this up through half a dozen long romances on the same 
pattern, than that it showed signs of failing at last. The prose 
romance, though not free from this danger, is very much less exposed 
to it. The details of form which are most prominent in verse, in 
prose have no great obviousness, and the subject and treatment can 
be varied to a far greater extent. 

But Scott was a famous raconteur from his youth ; he had 
already made more than one or two attempts at the novel, and when 
at last he fished W^aiierley out of an old desk, completed it, and 

published it in the year 18 14, it must have been at once 
itsTuccessors. evident to alert and competent judges, and it very soon 

forced itself upon others, that a very new and very im- 
portant planet had swum into literary ken. The book, the earlier 
part of wliich was old work, after a very short time develops an 
attack which had never been brought to bear before. Scott, who 
always confessed his obligations, and sometimes out of mere Quixotry 
invented them altogether, ascribed some to Miss Edgeworth, and the 
excellent Jane Porter^ claimed others. But the interesting historical 
passage of the last Jacobite insurrection was made alive as it had 
never been made before ; the vivid delineations of Scottish scenery, 
character, and manner hit the English reader as full from their 
novelty and freshness as they hit the Scotch reader from their truth. 
And the real secret of the book's success was different. It was that 

ijane (1776-1850) and Anna Maria (1780-1832) Porter were sisters, who 
wrote many novels in a style partly Radcliffian, witli more sentiment, more 
liistory, and less mystery. The most famous, Thaddcus of Warsaw (1803) and 
The Scottish Chiefs (iSio), were Jane's, and undoubtedly preceded Waverley in 
time, but were utterly different in quality. 



CHAP. II THE NOVEL — SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 679 

here, almost for the first tune since Fielding (for even Smollett 
had busied himself more with " humours " and eccentricities), was 
the true and universal sort of life displayed in this form of literature. 
The places were real, not the cardboard scenery of a toy theatre ; the 
persons were real, too, not more or less gaudily-coloured " charac- 
ters" thrust on the stage on wooden slides. No fictitious places, 
except, perhaps, Robinson Crusoe^s cave and castle, had presented 
themselves to the English reader as Tullyveolan did, and the attrac- 
tions of Tullyveolan were somewhat more advanced than those of the 
castle and the cave. The Baron, the Bailie, not to mention others, 
were such persons as only the stage had given previously, and as the 
stage had hardly given for many generations save at long intervals. 
Education, reading, wits, might make IVaverley more delightful ; it 
hardly needed any of them to produce delight. 

Scott was not neglectful of the new vein he had discovered. In 
the ten or twelve years which passed between the publication of 
Waverley and the failure of Ballantyne and Co., he produced, 
generally in very rapid succession, and as the result of sometimes 
not more than six weeks', and never more than a few months', work 
on any single novel, a series in which nearly all the members were 
masterpieces. The first of these in order were the two great novels, 
more domestic in tone than Waver/ey, but in the first instance at 
least chequered by not a little adventure, of Guy Ma)tnering (181 5) 
and The Antiquary (1816), and another "history," Old Mortality. 
In these three books a consensus of the best judgments has agreed to 
recognise Scott's very best work, though the charms of the whole are 
so great and various that selection of any one or two as " best " is 
difficult and distasteful. Tlie Black Dwarf., which appeared with 
Old Mortality m December 1 816, was admittedly less happy. But in 
Rob Roy (18 17) which followed (the^ whole of these novels were 
anonymous, and Scott complicated his anonymity by changing the 
general titles from " Tales of my Landlord " back to novels " by the 
author of Waverley'''')., a return to a height not far, if at all, below the 
highest has been generally recognised, while here first, in Die Vernon, 
Scott achieved a thoroughly attractive heroine. So, too. The Heart 
of Midlothian, 181 8 (the second series of the "Tales of my Land- 
lord"), gives a wonderful mixture of pathos in the story of Efiie 
and Jeanie Deans ; while some have seen a masterpiece in the 
tragically ambitious Bride of La/n/ner/noor (18 19). As to the com- 
panion with which the Bride, like Old Mortality, was supplied, 
A Legend of Montrose, the completeness and excellence of its action 
have generally been granted, and there is no greater favourite than 
Dugald Dalgetty with some of Scott's most faithful lovers. 

Hitherto Scott had confined himself entirely to his native country. 



68o THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

He now (1819) left it altogether, and took the times of Coeur de Lion 
in England for his subject in Ivaiilioe. Some petty objections of the 
pedantic kind have been taken by historians to his details, but of the 
very high merit of the book as a whole there can be little doubt. It 
was the first book to show the immense advantages of the Middle 
Ages for prose fiction, and the happiest. The two novels which 
followed, and which are connected in subject, TJie Monastery and 
Tlie Abbot (both 1820), returned to Scotland in the times of Queen 
Mary ; but the first, which attempted the supernatural in a rather 
half-hearted way, was and is thought less of a success than the 
second, where the escape from Loch Leven, with all the scenes 
leading up to it, the brilliant picture of Edinburgh under Murray, 
and the figure of Catherine Seyton, rank with Scott's best things. 
Then followed Koiiliuorth (January 1821), a book of the greatest 
brilliancy, variety, and pathos; The Pirate (December 1821), in 
which Scott, with one of his special turns of genius, has fixed the 
scenery and characteristics of the Shetland Islands for ever in his 
readers' minds; The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), with its incompar- 
able picture of James I. and its sketch of Whitefriars ; and Peveril 
of the Peak (1823), where the opportunity of the Popish Plot is not 
quite so happily taken. But, in tlie same year with Peveril and in the 
next, that astonishing variety which was Scott's chief characteristic 
was shown by three other books of wonderful goodness and variety — 
Quentin Durward, a novel of foreign historical adventure which 
hardly comes behind his very best ; St. Ronan^s IVell, a return to 
the domestic model of The Antiquary, but with more tragic touches 
and a more modern tone, which, had its end not been spoilt by 
deference to injudicious advice, would have been far more really 
tragic than The Bride of Lammermoor ; and Pedgauntlet, which 
would be the equal of the best of all were it not for a certain inco- 
herence of construction and inequality of parts, but which is of hardly 
excelled interest in many ways, being partly autobiographical, and 
enshrining the marvellous " Wandering Willie's Tale." A little 
before the beginning of the end, in July 1825 (the smash following 
in January 1826), he published the two "Tales of the Cnjsaders," 
The Talisman, a capital, 77ie Betrothed, a more questioned, example 
of his skill. 

He had no further opportunity to compose fiction with untroubled 
mind, and first the labour of his Life of Napoleon, then illness ever 
increasing, and the revision of the whole set of novels for a new 
annotated edition, left him not much time for it. Yet the best things 
at least of Woodstock (1827) and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) 
are very little below his happiest; the minor "Chronicles of the 
Canongate " have an introduction, couched in the form of fiction and 



CHAP. II THE NOVEL — SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 68i 

of exquisite beauty, and A7ine of Geier stein (1828-29) is better than 
most critics allow. When Count Robert of Paris, and still more 
when Castle Dangerous was written, softening of the brain had 
certainly set in ; yet even here there are things that no one before 
Scott, and few after him, can match. 

General comment on Scott's novel-work can only be presented 
here in a rigidly limited summary. He created the historical novel, 
after some thousand years of unsuccessful attempt. He first showed 
how national character, national dialect, national charac- 
teristics generally, could be made, not as the drama had achfevenTent. 
already made them, implements in burlesque and interlude, 
but a main " colour," a substantive element, in the interest of fiction. 
He added to the gallery of imaginary personages more and greater 
figures than had been added by any one except Shakespeare. He 
did what even Shakespeare had been prevented by his medium of 
communication from doing with equal fulness — he provided a com- 
panion gallery of landscape and "•interior" such as had never been 
known before. And partly by actual example, partly by indication 
and as harbinger, he showed the possibility of kinds of novel quite 
different from those which he most commonly practised himself. He 
found the class still half-despised, very scantily explored, popular, but 
with a sort of underground and illicit popularity. He left it the 
equal of any literary dej^artment in repute, profit, possibility ; and 
(which must be said, though it is travelling out of our usual record) 
he infused into it, as Fielding had begun to do before him, a tradition 
of moral and intellectual health, of manliness, of truth and honour, 
freedom and courtesy, which has distinguished the best days of the 
English novel as it distinguishes those of hardly any other literary 
kind. 

While Scott was thus indicating almost all the possible lines of 
fiction, and following some of them out with astonishing thoroughness 
and success, a lady, not much his own junior but destined to a much 
shorter life than his, was achieving hardly less real sue- 
cess in others, especially those which he touched least. 
Jane Austen, daughter of the rector of Steventon in North Hamp- 
shire, was born there in December 1775. She was well educated, 
but lived all her life in the country or in country towns, especially 
Bath, Southampton, and the village of Chawton near Winchester. 
She never married, and she died in Winchester itself on i8th July 
1817. She had begun to write quite early, well before the end of 
the eighteenth century, but she found no publisher, and her actual 
first book Afort hanger Abbey, though bought by one in 1797, did not 
appear till after her death. In 181 1, however. Sense and Sensibility 
was issued, and was followed by Pride and Prejudice in 1813 (both 



682 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

had been written nearly as early as Ahn'tlianger Abbey). Mansfield 
Park appeared in 1814, and E//ii//a, two years later. Persuasion, 
her last completed work, was published the year after her death with 
NortJianger Abbey, the first begun. She also left a few fragments, 
but nothing of any importance ; nor are her letters, whicli were pub- 
lished many years later by Lord Brabourne, in 1884, of the first 
interest, though they illustrate agreeably enough some of the 
characteristics and atmosphere of the novels. The squirearchy and 
the upper professional class, esj^ecially in the country, supplied her 
with the materials of a set of books which, though not startling or 
imposing, have from the very date of their appearance impressed all 
the best judges, of the most diverse tastes, as among the very best 
things in prose fiction. 

The first thing noticeable in these novels is that the last vestige 
of the usual romantic character has disappeared. There is an elope- 
ment, but no abduction. The first book, Nortliaiigcr Abbey, turns in 
great part on good-natured raillery of tlie Terror School ; the scheme, 
characters, events, are strictly (some palpitating souls seem indeed to 
find them ruthlessly and crushingly) ordinary. The rest of the 
interest of Nofthanger Abbey itself turns on the adventures of a 
pretty and fairly clever girl at Bath, and at the house of a tyrannical 
general, who, mistaking he*" for an heiress, invites her, pays her ex- 
travagant court in hopes that she will marry his son, and practically 
turns her out of doors when he finds his error. Sense and Sensibility 
contrasts the fates of two sisters, one impulsive, one sedate, who have 
lost their father, and are left in narrow circumstances, but with many 
rich and some not unkind relations and friends. Pride and Preju- 
dice, the author's masterpiece (which had, like the Lyrical Ballads, 
been written in 1797), is the history of a high-spirited girl who 
rejects the offers of a rich and important personage because of his 
disrespect to her family ; Mansfield Park, that of a penniless damsel 
brought up among her rich cousins ; Emma, by some exalted to 
the first place, that of an heiress a little spoilt by her position ; 
Persuasion, that of a younger daughter of a good family who allows 
herself to be "put upon," by her family and friends. The average 
eighteenth-century novel had never dared to apjjear without a good 
or wicked lord ; Miss Austen scarcely mentions any one above the 
rank of a baronet. The eighteenth century had been faithful to its 
Aristotle as it understood him, and to its revolutions and dis- 
coveries. In Miss Austen there are no discoveries of any but the 
mildest importance, and hardly any but rose-water and rose-leaf 
revolutions. 

Yet, simple as are the plots, they are worked out with extraor- 
dinary closeness and completeness, and the characters and dialogue 



CHAr. II THE NOVEL — SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 683 

are of such astonishing finesse and life that it would hardly matter if 
there were no plot at all. From first to last this hold on life never 
fails Miss Austen, nor does the simple, suggestive, half-ironic style 
in whicli she manages to convey her meaning. Not even Scott's or 
Thackeray's characters dwell in the mind more securely than John 
Thorpe, the bragging, babbling undergraduate in Nortliaiiger Abbey, 
and the feather-brained, cold-hearted flirt, his sister Isabella; than 
the Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice, every member of which is 
a masterpiece, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the arrogant lady 
patroness, and Mr. Collins her willing toady; than Mrs. Norris, half 
sycophant, half tyrant, in Mansfield Park ; than the notable chatterer 
Miss Bates in Einnia. Miss Austen's portraiture is distinctly sath'ical, 
it has even been accused of a touch of cruelty ; but this only gives 
flavour and keeping quality. The best points of her handling, in- 
deed — her Addisonian humour, her almost Fieldingian life — she could 
not communicate. But she showed once for all the capabilities of 
the very commonest and most ordinary life, if sufficiently observed 
and selected, and combined with due art, to furnish forth prose fiction 
not merely that would pass, but that should be of the absolutely first 
quality as literature. She is the mother of the English nineteenth- 
century novel, as Scott is the father of it. 

The example, however, of her style was not by any means at once 
followed, and though, about ten years after the appearance of IVavcrley, 
imitations of Scott became common, nothing of real excellence in the 
kind was produced for many years more. The coming importance, 
however, of fiction in the literature of the century was shown by the 
almost simultaneous uprising of practitioners of many different kinds of 
novel. We must note at least Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier, Gait, 
Harrison Ainsworth, G. P. R. James, Bulwer — to use the name by 
which the first Lord Lytton gained and kept his popularity as a 
novelist- — Peacock, and Lord Beaconsfield, adding, perhaps, a 
paragraph of minorities. 

Of the two ladies first mentioned, who played, to Ireland and Scot- 
land respectively, the part played for England by Miss Austen, though 
with less intensity of genius and less universality, Miss Edgeworth 
was the elder. She was born in 1767, her father being 
a clever but vain and odd man who married many wives, Edceworth. 
championed many crotchets, wrote a good deal, and did 
not improve his daughter's books by meddling with them. Besides 
many quite admirable stories of and for children, which contain work 
equal to the best parts of her regular novels, Miss Edgeworth produced 
Castle Rackrent (1801), an Irish story, or rather study of manners; 
Belinda (1803), dealing with society in London; The Absentee and 
Ormond, the two best of her purely Irisli novels, and others down to 



684 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE 



Hele7i in 1834. She died in 1849. ^he enjoys tlie very high honour of 
being admitted asjn part his original by Scott, and it is undoubtedly 
true that, with the exception of a few Scotch touches in Smollett, 
national characteristics had seldom been introduced into imaginative 
work except for purposes of burlesque. Besides her knowledge of 
her countrymen. Miss Edgeworth had a very fair grasp of humanity 
generally, much humour, and at her best a light and easy style. But, 
partly under the direct influence of her father, she was apt to infuse 
into her work too much moralising, after the French eighteenth- 
century pattern ; slie had no power of managing plot, and even in 
dialogue and character she will lapse from good to bad, from 
brilliancy to dulness, with a suddenness irritating and almost incom- 
prehensible. She is thus better in short stories than in long ones. 

Susan Ferrier, on the other hand, who was born in 1782, and did 
not die till 1854, attempted nothing but long novels, and only three 
of these. She was the daughter of an Edinburgh Writer to the 
Signet, a friend of Sir Walter's, and was aunt to the 
philosopher Professor Ferrier. It seems to have been 
with a good deal of misgiving that she put together the series of 
sketches (for it is hardly a connected novel) called Marriage (1812); 
but it was warmly received andjdeserved the reception, though it is a 
very odd compound of a sentiment-novel a la Mackenzie and a series 
of satiric sketches, sometimes as vigorous as Smollett, and not with- 
out touches of extreme severity. Her next and best novel. The 
/n/ieritance, still preserves the compound, but the texture of the book 
is closer, and the humorous pictures — Lord Rossmore, Miss 
Pratt the busybody. Uncle Adam (an audacious taking-off of the 
author's father), Miss Bell Black, evaporce and idiot, and others — gain 
in width of stroke and brilliancy of colour. Destiny^ the third, falls 
back rather to the conditions of Marriage^ being a long and rather 
disjointed chronicle with a good deal of sentiment and only oc- 
casional strokes of humour. But Miss Ferrier's best things have 
high distinction, the general Scotch quality being original (for neither 
Scott nor Gait had written when Marriage appeared) and well 
blended with the author's own sarcastic observation. 

John Gait completes the trio, for though the *E ^rick Shepherd" 
wrote novels, they came later, and are, with the exception of the 
strange and striking Confesuons of a Justified Sinner, of much less 
importance. He was born in May 1779 at Irvine, in 
Ayrshire, and died at Greenock in April 1839. Gait 
was a man of business and a public servant, who at one time had the 
prospect of a great future as manager of the Canada Company. 
But, not it would seem by any fault of his own, he was unlucky, and 
died with broken fortunes. He had both travelled and written a 



cuAi'. II THE NOVEL — SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 685 

great deal ; but of his abundant work nothing but his novels, and not 
the whole of these, has survived. He is known by The Ayrshire 
Legatees, The Annals of the Parish, Sir Andrew IVylie, The Entail, 
and The Provost. The first of these is one of the numerous imita- 
tions of Hnniphrey Clinker, and the third a sort of fantasy-piece, 
amusing both as he meant it to be and as he did not. But The 
Annals, The Entail, and The Provost exhibit the humours of Scot- 
tish life in the country and in small towns at the beginning of the 
century with very great talent, and even some genius of a limited and 
peculiar kind. Gait's dialect is more distinctly local and peculiar 
than Scotfs, and his literary faculty is not to be named in the same 
breath. But if less universal, he is perhaps even more racily 
particular. 

Two pairs may follow — Ainsworth and James, Disraeli and 
Bulwer. William Harrison Ainsworth, the son of a Manchester 
lawyer, was born in 1805 ; George Payne Rainsford James four 
years earlier, the son of a London physician. But 
Ainsworth long outlived James (who died as consul at andjames. 
Venice in i860), and did not himself die till 1882, 
having ^vritten till a short time before his death. The flourishing 
time of both was the second quarter of the century, at the very 
beginning of which Ainsworth started with Sir John Chiverton 
(1825), which, however, it is said, he did not write alone; James 
with Richelieu (1829). Neither was a man of strictly literary power, 
tliough James was the superior of Ainsworth as a writer, and did 
some respectable work in other departments besides the novel. But 
both have been rather absurdly depreciated of late. All their best 
works were published before the middle of the century. 

The second pair rises higher. Benjamin Disraeli was born in 
London on 31st December 1804, being the son of the ingenious 
miscellanist and antiquarian writer, Isaac D'Israeli. He was privately 
i Jucated, and intended for the law, but turned very 
early to literature. He was not yet of age, nor the Beaconsfield. 
author of Vivian Grey, when he negotiated on Murray's 
part with Lockhart for the setting up of the Representative news- 
paper, which pro'^ea a costly failure. Vivian Grey itself, his first 
novel, was published next year (1826), and was followed, before Dis- 
raeli succeeded in getting into Parliament in 1837, by other novels 
or novelettes, Captain Popanilla, The Young Duke, Contarini 
Fleming, Alroy, the florid but really passionate and beautiful love- 
story of Henrietta Temple, and the interesting working-up of Byron's 
life called Venetia. The most characteristic and brilliant, however, 
of his novels came afterwards, when he was already on the eve of 
political leadership — G7;»«^i-iJ>' (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred 



686 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

(1847). The later Lothair (1870) and Endyinion (1880) are chiefly 
asides and pastimes written to beguile the leisure of Opposition. 

Just as no one, either during his life or since, has ever quite known 
what to make of Lord Beaconstield in himself, so no one has ever quite 
known what to make of his books. Their brilliant and astonishing 
cleverness is not denied by any competent critic ; few question the 
wit (only wanting Heine's passion to be, like Heine's, humour as well) 
which suffuses them ; not many persons of any imagination or even 
fancy have failed to be fascinated by the fantastic play of invention, 
the restless fertility of thought and image and innuendo, with which 
they abound. On the other hand, not many sound critics would deny 
that their sentiment is often questionable ; that their taste in other 
ways invites the epithets, tawdry, rhetorical, gaudy; that they some- 
times sin by personality ; and that, except in small things like Ixion 
and The Infernal Marriage, or in Henrietta Temple, they can never 
be said finally and fully to reach success in the kind to which they 
seem to wish to belong. But the steady progress between Vivian 
Grey and Venetia, and the vigour of the great political trio which 
follows, may be thought to show that, if their author had not merged 
his literary interests in a more exciting game, he might have done 
even better. No great literature has ever been produced as a 
parergon unless it was trifling in bulk ; and latterly, if not from the 
first, Disraeli's literary work was always a parergon. 

The first Lord Lytton, earlier known as Bulwer or Buhver-Lytton 

(he was a younger son of the Bulwers of Norfolk, and representative 

through his mother of the Lyttons of Hertfordshire), was a slightly 

older man, born in 1803 (?). He was educated at Cam- 

Lytton! bridge, where he obtained the Chancellor's Medal for 
English verse, a form for which he always had some 
hankering, while he was also a dramatist of more accomplishment 
than most of his century, and a writer of most kinds of prose. His 
public life began almost as early as his literary career, for he sat in 
the unreformed Parliament. In 1835 he was made a Baronet. He 
began life as a Whig, but gradually became more Conservative in his 
opinions, and ranked in that party for the greater part of his life. 
He was Colonial Secretary in 1858, and died in 1873, having been 
raised to the peerage some years before. 

His first novel, Falkland, was published anonymously in 1827; 
his second, Pelhain, appeared with his name, and though it can 
hardly be called a great book, made, and has to some extent kept, 
mark as one of the first of fashionable or dandy novels. Carlyle's 
severe satire on it in Saftor Resarttis is itself a tribute to the eff"ect 
the book produced, if not also to some intrinsic quality in it. It was 
followed by a long series of novels in many different styles, the 



CHAP. II THE NOVEL — SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 687 

versatile quality of Bulwer's talent being sensible to the slightest 
veering of popular taste. It hardly one of these novels can be called 
a masterpiece, there is also hardly one which does not display clever- 
ness in a very high degree, and it is by no means certain that books 
like Ernest Maliravers, The Last Days of Pompeii, and Harold may 
not have more than one return of the popularity which, indeed, has 
not even yet been exchanged for complete oblivion. This versatility 
was shown in still more remarkable fashion when, about the middle 
of the century, the novelist completely abandoned the terror-novel, 
the sentimental novel, the historical novel, and all the rest, turned to 
the domestic kind which was then becoming fashionable, and pro- 
duced in The Caxtons, My Novel, and IVhat zuill he do with it? 
books which attained a great reputation, and have been dethroned 
rather by things diiTerent than by better things. In yet a third 
period, from i860 to his death, Bulwer displayed this almost unique 
faculty of trimming his sails once more, writing wonder-stories of a new 
kind in the Stratige Story and the consummate The Haunted and 
the Haunters, fantastic romances of the future in The Coining Race, 
pictures of actual contemporary life, as fresh as those of his youth, in 
Kenelni Chillingly. There never was the slightest sign of exhaustion 
in him, and it is scarcely an extravagance to say that however long 
he had lived, and whatever changes of taste, fashion, thought, he had 
seen, he would always have been equal to the task of reflecting them 
in fiction as he had already done for nearly half a century. The 
Nemesis of such literary prestidigitation is almost invariably and 
necessarily a want of depth and intensity ; and no doubt this is to be 
found in Bulwer. It is a minor matter, but one also unfortunate for 
him, that he acquired at first, and therefore, even with his gifts for 
quick change, could . never wholly lose, the insincere high-flown 
Byronic style which, after impressing for a decade or two, became 
the laughing-stock of many decades more. The taste for this may 
not impossibly return, and if so, the popularity of Bulwer may return 
with it ; but it is improbable that this revival will extend to more than 
a part of his work. 

It is hard to draw the line between those novelists who deserve 
independent mention and those who must be dealt with in batches. 
Not a few of the writers in this period, who found their real 
vocation elsewhere, were novelists occasionally — a fact 
which is always a valuable literary and historical indica- Lockhart. 
tion of the growing popularity of a kind. James Hogg, 
the Ettrick Shepherd, it has been said, wrote novels ; Leigh Hunt 
wrote novels ; even Moore, in his prSse tale of The Epicurean, 
approached the style. De Ouincey and Wilson, whose proper 
sphere was essay-writing, tried prose fiction ; and there was a time 



688 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

(1821-25) when Wilson's colleague, Lockhart, seemed to be likely to 
devote himself wholly, or at least mainly, to it. But Lockhart's four 
novels, Reginald Dalton, Valerius, Adam Blair, and Matthew IVald, 
while showing the great literary faculty and the unusual powers of 
mind which their author possessed, showed also that novel-writing 
was not his vocation. Reginald Dalton is indeed one of the first 
examples of the University novel, and Valerius one of the very 
first attempts to apply to classical times the processes which, in Scott's 
hands, had been so effective in mediaeval and modern. But in both 
cases Lockhart '■ was not the magician." He came nearer to success 
in the intense and powerful novelette of Adam Blair, but this is rather 
a single situation than a complete story ; and Matthew IVald, a novel 
of madness, is almost a failure. 

But the time, though not so fertile as that of our concluding Book, 
was fertile in men who devoted themselves with more or less success 
to the kind. The greatest of these from the literary side, though 
perhaps he can hardly be called a great novelist, was 
undoubtedly Thomas Love Peacock, who was bom in 
1785, became a scholar of no mean order without any regular 
education, and a high official in the East India Company, without 
either entering its service early or devoting himself to any profession, 
lived to a great age, and died in 1866. One of Peacock's novels, 
Gryll Grange, belongs to almost the latest period of this history, to 
the time when, in retirement, he looked out, with no senile petulance 
but with his old sardonic attitude, on a world more changed from 
that of his youth than that of his youth was from the days of Addison 
or even Dryden. But most of his fiction, Headlong Hall, Melincourt, 
Nightmare Abbey, Maid Marian, The Misfortunes of Elphin, and 
Crotchet Castle, belongs to the time between Waterloo and the first 
Reform Bill. These exhibit, as does Gryll Grange thirty years later, 
a satirical mood, not exactly that of the bookworm but certainly that 
of the man of letters, towards all popular cants and follies of the 
political, social, and literary kind. Peacock was a friend of Shelley, 
and in his earlier books he is singularly unjust to the Lake poets ; 
not, it would seem, owing to political prejudice, though there was in 
him then something of this, but from a survival of eighteenth-century 
and slightly Voltairian impatience of some forms of romance. He 
himself, however, was clearly enough a romantic writer with classical 
varnish, and with a stronger clitiamen towards the Aristophanic than 
towards the Aeschylean temper. He wrote good verse ; and good is 
too weak a word for his songs, especially his convivial songs, which 
are among the very best in literature. But his proper literary dialect 
was prose, especially (though he was a master of description) ironic 
dialogue and comment of a kind peculiar to himself. That it had 



CHAP. II THE NOVEL — SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 689 

much influence on Thackeray there can be no doubt at all. But Peacock 
was always nearer to wit than to humour, though in some of the out- 
lying kinds of the latter, notably in that which animates The Mis- 
fortunes of Elp/iifi, he was a very great master. 

In Charles Lever, who was born in 1806, and who, writing 
novels indefatigably from about his thirtieth year, entered the 
consular service, and died consul at Trieste in 1872, there was some 
resemblance to Bulwer — not indeed in tone or temper, 

,. , , , , • 1 r ■■,■ • 1 Lever. 

but in knowledge of the world, and in the facility with 
which he successively adopted quite different styles of writing, to suit 
the public taste. Lever, who was an Irishman by birth, a member 
of Trinity College, DubUn, and by profession a physician, had 
accumulated vast stores of anecdote; and he began to pour these 
out, with very little arrangement, in the " rollicking " books of which 
Harry Lorrequer and Charles 0''Malley are the chief. After a time 
he changed his scenes chiefly to the Continent, and made a great 
advance in the method of his novels ; while for some years before 
his death he almost entirely abandoned the modern-picaresque style 
which he had so long pursued, and attempted, not without success, a 
more sober and careful study of ordinary life and manner. But it is 
probably by his military and Irish extravaganzas that he will live, if he 
does live. 

Frederick Marryat played, but much more thoroughly, the same 
part towards the navy that Lever occupied towards the army. He was 
born in 1792, saw much service even after the overthrow of Napoleon, 
and having obtained post rank, distinguished himself 
especially in the first Burmese war. Then he turned to 
the press, not merely writing but editing for many years, and latterly 
attempting to farm his own land in Norfolk, not with success. His 
series of naval novels, from Frank Mildniay onwards, is perhaps the 
most remarkable instance of a man working his professional know- 
ledge with effect in literature. The mere writing is frequently 
careless, and the construction, as usual at this period, exceedingly 
haphazard. But the character-studies, if rather external, are constantly 
vivid and true, the adventures are often exciting and always amusing, 
and some of the books, especially Peter Simple and Mr. Midsliipnian 
Easy, are not likely soon to grow obsolete. 

The only other naval novels worth mentioning here are the two 
remarkable books of Michael Scott, a man of whom very little is 
known, but who contributed Tom Cringle'' s Log cind The Cruise of the 
Midge to Blackwood. If Marryat has little plot, Scott 
has none at all ; but he had, what Marryat had not, 8001^ 
a command of elaborate picturesque style which, like 
that of his perhaps master, Christopher North, sometimes passes 

2Y 



690 THE TRIUMni OF ROMANCE book x 

into the grandiloquent and bombastic, but at its best is very 
impressive. 

We can hardly do more than mention Charles Robert Maturin 
( 1 782-1 824), whose powerful diablerie of Meliiwth the Wanderer 
(1820) has never ceased to fascinate some readers in each genera- 
tion; Theodore Hook, the fun-maker of the third and 

others" fourth decades of the century, before Dickens, and 
long before Thackeray appeared — a man whose talents, 
amounting very nearly to genius, are vouched for by strong testi- 
mony, but can hardly be said to appear in his books save in shreds 
and patches ; Mrs. Gore, a very clever writer of fashionable and 
other novels ; or the authors of a considerable number of single 
books, like the Anastasiiis of Thomas Hope, the Hajji Baba of 
James Morier, and the Frankenstein of Mrs. Shelley, which sur- 
vive by reputation, and even to a certain extent by reading. And 
this remark may serve even more with regard to the corresponding 
chapter in the next Book, where an even larger number of such 
books and authors would claim attention if it were accorded to any 
of their number. The lesser dramatists of the Renaissance and the 
seventeenth century, the lesser poets of the eighteenth, the lesser 
novelists of the nineteenth, have to pay a penalty which is as just as 
it is inevitable. They form part of great regiments, almost of 
corporate bodies, in which their individuality is lost. But for the 
greater men they probably would never have written; and they must 
be content to be represented by them. 



CHAPTER III 

THE NEW ESSAY 

Progress and defects of the earlier essay — Magazines and Reviews — The Edin- 
burgh : Jeffrey — Its contributors : Scott's criticism — Brougham — Syilney 
Smith — The Quartei-ly — The new Magazine — Blackwood's : "Christopher 
North" — Lockhart — The London — Lamb — Leigh Hunt — Hazlitt — De 
Quincey — Landor's prose — Cobbett 

Despite the mighty work of Scott and the exquisite accompHshment 
of Miss Austen, it may be doubted whether the novel is the chief 
special feature in prose of the first thirty years of the nineteenth 
century. That position belongs rather to the new develop- p^^ ^.^^^ ^^^ 
ments of the essay, which were fostered, and indeed defects of the 
rendered possible, by the increased demand for periodical ^^^ ^^^ ^^%^y- 
literature. We have seen how the essay, unknown by name and not 
much known in fact before the end of the sixteenth century, had 
already tended to include all subjects for prose treatment in its 
province ; how it absorbed the Character, developed further its own 
special vein of egotistic meditation, asserted in Dryden's hands the 
proper place of literary criticism, became in those of the Steele- 
Addison group the rival, and the successful rival, of the drama and the 
sermon as the popular form of reading, and maintained that position 
well through the eighteenth century. 

In these two centuries it had already touched nearly every 
subject, and had been written by the most eminent hands ; but its 
general organisation had been defective. In the seventeenth century it 
had had to appear as an independent book, as a pamphlet, 
or at best as a preface to something else. Even the ^Reviews^" 
essay-periodicals of the eighteenth were anything but 
perfect in method. To give themselves a countenance as well as 
a frame and platform, they had to affect artificial devices which 
hampered more than they helped, and soon palled on public taste. 
They depended either on individuals of genius, or on a fortuitous and 
unstable combination of individuals of talent, and so could never last. 

691 



692 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE 



It is true that periodicals of something like the modern scheme did 
exist — the famous Gentleman'' s Magazine as early as 1731, the 
scarcely less famous Critical and Monthly Reviews a little later. ^ 
But they enjoyed little reputation or circulation ; they were mostly 
written for wretched pay by always needy and sometimes unscrupulous 
hacks. There was a suspicion of discredit about periodical writing 
which even the participation in it of men like Smollett did not remove ; 
nor does it appear that these papers, at any rate the two Reviews, 
would have given any welcome to the sprouts of an outsider's brain, 
even if he had offered them for nothing. 

The Review, however, was to be recognised sooner than the 
Magazine, and even before the new form of magazine was provided 
by the London and Blackwood, the daily papers served as hosts and 
The Edin iiitroducers to a good deal of original and critical work 
burgh: of the cssay kind. There is no doubt that the main credit, 
je rey. j£ ^^^^ ^^ actually launching, of carrying safe to sea, the 
EdinbH7-gh Review, the first of the new fleet of periodicals, is due 
to Francis Jeffrey, who with Sydney Smith and others planned and 
began the Edinburgh Review in 1802, while after the first number 
he was its sole editor. Jeffrey was born in Edinburgh on 23rd 
October 1773, was educated at the High School and University 
there as well as at Glasgo\v, and for a short time at Oxford, and was 
called to the Scottish bar. Despite his addiction to literature he 
never gave up his practice, and though not at first successful, 
gradually made himself a name. When his party at last came into 
power after the Reform Bill, he was made Lord Advocate, became a 
Judge, and died in 1850, having for nearly twenty years given up all 
but a consultative connection with the management of the Review. 
But for the first thirty years of its life he was, except in cases of con- 
tributors like Sydney Smith, who were too valuable to be lost and 
too independent to be driven, all-powerful ; and there is no doubt 
that he directly and indirectly influenced a great branch of literature 
as few others have done. His own critical work has been variously, 
and since his death for the most part unfavourably, estimated. That 
he was both prejudiced in extra-literary matters, and somewhat 
uncatholic in literary matters proper, cannot be denied. But he had 
a real knowledge of English literature, a creed too narrow indeed, 
but not so narrow as is sometimes thouglit, and witliin the blinkers of 
that creed a very sharp and steady vision. 

Jeffrey's a.ssociates at first included even Scott, for the extreme 

iThe distinction of these titles was no doubt intentional, and though the 
sharp division has been lost it still exists to some extent. The Revieiu proper is 
nothing if not critical; the Magazine is more of a miscellany, and began early to 
serve as a vehicle for prose fiction. 



THE NEW ESSAY 693 



Whig principles which were afterwards to distinguish the Review 
were not at once asserted, at least exclusively, nor was reviewing by 
any means the least of Sir Walter's accomplishments, jj^ contribu- 
though his critical and miscellaneous writings are far too tors: Scott's 
little read now. He was not an adept in the minor 
branches of criticism, and he was perhaps rather too universally 
good-natured, though this is a much better fault in a critic than 
universal ill-nature. But his sense of the general principles of 
literature, and not merely imaginative literature, was extremely sound, 
his wide reading enabled him to illustrate his articles in a manner 
both useful and amusing, and his very narrative faculty came in for 
the purpose of making the article a unity, instead of the heap of 
disjointed observations which is sometimes put forward. 

Only one other of the individual contributors to the Review could 
pretend to very high literary qualities. Professors Playfair and 
Leslie were respectable pundits in their different lines ; Francis 
Horner, a man who died too young to disparage the praises of his 
friends, was a political economist of some solidity. It is less easy to 
designate briefly the once eminent and still conspicuous, if rather 
enigmatic, figure of Henry Brougham, who raised himself 
with little aid but his own talents to the Lord Chancellor- ^ "^ ^™" 
ship of England, wrote on every subject, was at first dreaded, then 
distrusted, and finally disregarded, by every party, passed from 
almost the highest position in Parliament as a debater to the leader- 
ship of " Pantopragmatical " Social Science congresses and the 
like, lived to a great age, and is now never read save out of curiosity. 
He was of an old and good Westmoreland family, but was born in 
Edinburgh (1778), was wholly educated there, and was to all intents 
and purposes much more of a Scot than of an Englishman. His 
once brilliant political career, and its warnings, do not concern us ; 
and his contributions to literature had little solidity, permanence, or 
even temporary attraction, beyond that of a forcible-flashy style, well 
enough adapted for the debate and the newspaper, but unsuitable for 
the book. But he was a valuable, if sometimes a very troublesome, 
" contributor," ready to write, and write eff'ectively enough, on any 
subject, in any space, at any notice. 

Sydney Smith, though a professed jester, stands far above 
Brougham, far above all the other contributors but Scott, and a good 
deal above his coadjutor and successor in the editorship. He was 
almost the only Englishman on the original staff of the c • v, 

Edinburgh, and it may have been the characteristics of "^ ^ 
that staff (he never seems to have known Scott much) which pointed 
a certain famous remark of his about Scotsmen and jokes. He 
himself is almost the only man on record who has established a high 



694 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book X 

and secure reputation in literature by joking merely. For with him 
wit and humour were not, as with Aristophanes, or Shakespeare, or 
Moliere, or Swift, or even with men like Congreve, means to an end. 
He had, indeed, strong political, religious, and other views, but they 
never readied the dignity of principles. He might just as well 
have been on the other side, and, as his later work shows, would 
pretty certainly have been there had he been born a generation earlier 
or later. The volleys of his wit required some object, and they 
found it in Tory abuses, " Catholic " disqualification, the Methodists, 
spring-guns, etc. ; but the battery would have played just as well on 
democracy and universal suffrage. Everything presented itself to 
Sydney as a joke actual or possible, and yet (for this is his highest 
glory) he is never a mere jack-pudding. And so the very Liberal Letters 
of Peter Plymley, early in his literary life, and the very Conservative 
Letters to Arc/ideacon Singleton at the end of it, with his Edinburgh 
articles, his letters and everything that he wrote, have obtained, and 
are likely to keep, a high place in literature. His ridicule is no test 
of truth ; it is possible to enjoy it to the very full, and yet believe 
heartily in all or most of the things he lauglied at. But if it has 
no force to destroy, it has infinite force to preserve itself. Sydney 
Smith was born in 1771, was educated at Winchester and Oxford, 
took orders, made his way to Edinburgh as a tutor, removed to London 
after his marriage, and for the greater part of his life was a country 
clergyman at Foston in Yorkshire and Combe Florey in Somerset. 
After the triumph of the Whigs he received a canonry at St. Paul's, 
and died in February 1845. 

The foundation, seven years later, of the Quarterly Review rather 
extended the field and varied the politics of this new kind of essay- 
writing than added any great new practitioners of it, with perhaps one 

exception. This was Southey, who, always a working 
Quarterly. ^^'^'^ of letters, had from his first literary beginnings 

worked (usually for wretched pay) in such reviews as 
were open to him, though he had on principle refused to contribute 
to the Edinburgh. With the Quarterly, which was expressly 
founded to defend Church and State, he had no such scruples, and 
for some quarter of a century it was at once one of his chief sources 
of r-evenue and the principal outlet of his miscellaneous writing. 
Scott, who had been disgusted with the Edinburgh politics, and 
seriously disobliged (in the case of Marniion') by the Edinburgh 
criticism, transferred his services to the new paper, which was edited 
by Gifford, and enjoyed the support of the Old Guard of the Anti- 
Jacobin (vide S7tpra, p. 596) from Canning downwards, together 
with all the more promising recruits, especially from the English 
universities, on the Tory sid«. These two periodicals, representing 



THE NEW ESSAY 695 



the two great parties and amply furnished with literary ability, took 
solid place at once, and for many years continued to be the head- 
quarters of serious discussion on politics, literature, religion, 
philosophy, and things in general. But they observed with even 
more strictness than their less distinguished predecessors the meaning 
of the word Review. They admitted no compositions of a fantastic 
or fictitious kind ; they only quoted verse ; and though their articles 
might sometimes use the books noted as what is called a "peg" to 
hang the reviewer's own views upon, yet such a peg was, as it is still, 
a sine qua no?i with them. 

The distinction between a Magazine and a Review was, as 
observed above, an old one, though the periodicals of the Spectator 
class had to some extent confounded the two. But the characters 
were mixed, though the name Magazine was preferred, in 
two publications, the London Magazine and Blacktvoocfs ^.^^ "^"' 

'^ 1 . 1 , Magazine. 

Magazine, which at very nearly the same moment, in 
181 7, introduced a yet new kind of periodical, and served as the means 
for introducing a very large amount of new literary talent, and in some 
cases genius, to the world. For twenty years previous to 181 7 such 
talent and (as in the notable case of Coleridge) such genius had been 
finding outlets in daily papers like the Times and the Morning Post, 
in weekly papers such as Leigh Hunt's Examiner, in refashioned 
imitations of the Spectator, such as his Indicator and Reflector. But 
the two remarkable monthly magazines named above came into 
existence in apparently the most haphazard manner — really, no 
doubt, because they were wanted, and had to be provided somehow. 
Blackwood'' s, the longest-lived by far, had a most unfortunate start, 
and was very near being a failure altogether, when it was completely 
revolutionised by a crew of brilliant wits, and launched afresh with the 
daring lampoon of the " Chaldee Manuscript " ; the London was more 
homogeneous throughout, but its career was very short, though 
almost without parallel brilliant. 

The men who came to the aid of Mr. William Blackwood, an 
Edinburgh publisher who combined enterprise and judgment in a 
most singular fashion, were first of all John Wilson, afterwards Pro- 
fessor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edin- Blackwood's- 
burgh, and John Gibson Lockhart, afterwards editor of " Christopher 
the Quarterly and son-in-law and biographer of Scott. . ""^^ ' 
Neither of them was at any time in the strict sense editor, and the 
final decision always rested with the publisher himself; but at one 
time he, Wilson, and Lockhart held, as it might be said, the editor- 
ship in commission, and until Blackwood's death and his own failure 
of health and spirits Wilson continued to hold something like this 
position after Lockhart had gone to London. Wilson, the elder of 



696 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE 



the two by nearly ten years, was born at Paisley in 1785 and 
educated at Glasgow and Oxford. He had inherited wealth, and for 
some time lived on his means at Elleray on Windermere. But the 
loss of great part of his fortune made him betake himself to Edin- 
burgh, where his mother was living, and though he made no mark at 
the Bar, he found his vocation almost at once on Blackzvood, and 
before long was elected to the Chair above mentioned. For fully 
twenty years he was the sou^ of the magazine unda- the name of 
" Christopher North," and actually wrote a large part of it in one 
form or another. In later years he took less share;, but he held his 
Chair till 1852, and hved till 1854. 

Before " Maga," as Blackwood'' s Magazine called itself by a 
punning abbreviation, came into existence, Wilson had made some 
distinction for himself as a poet, or at least a verse-writer, in his two 
volumes, The Isle of Palms (1812) and The City of the Plague (1816). 
The chief interest of these is, however, that they show the rapidity 
with which the example of the really great poets of the Romantic 
revival was caught up and followed. He also wrote stories, Lights 
and Shadows of Scottish Life, The Trials of Margaret Lindsay, etc., 
which are of very little merit, and are chiefly remarkable as showmg 
the excessive sentimentality which supplied the reaction to Wilson's 
boisterous spirits. Had his work been confined to these things it 
would now be wholly forgotten. But in magazine-writing itself he 
found or made the style which was his own — a style of fluent, full- 
voiced, indeed, as has been said, rather boisterous, descant upon 
things in general — sport, literature, scenery, politics, gastronomy, art. 
These descants sometimes took the shape of dialogue in the famous 
Nodes AmbrosiancB — a set of symposia the origination of which is 
variously attributed to Wilson himself, Lockhart, and Maginn {inde 
infra'), but which fell more and more under the sole management of 
Wilson — sometimes into monologues or ordinary reviews, many of 
which were collected later as TJie Recreations of Christopher North. 
A large number of these last are literary in subject, but Wilson also 
contributed much literary criticism of a less mercurial kind in the 
four volumes of his Essays, Critical and Imaginative, especially in 
the fourth. 

Wilson had great powers, and his writings contain many admir- 
able things. In particular, he was one of the main pioneers in the 
new adventure of ornate prose which, as on other occasions, suc- 
ceeded the poetical outburst of the earlier years of the century; and 
some of his efforts in this kind are not easily to be surpassed. He 
was also one of the first to record, in less formal language than Gilpin 
and his followers in the Picturesque, the effects of scenery, and quite 
the first to give literary form to field sports, while his talent for 



THE NEW ESSAY 697 



weaving miscellanea of all kinds into dialogue owed little to any 
model, and displayed resource and dexterity not falling far short 
of genius. But these merits were accompanied, nay, inextricably 
blended with, and also to no small extent marred by, great faults, of 
which the violence, both personal and political, common to the time 
was almost the least. The most important of these was, in the 
first place, an almost incredible and quite unparalleled infirmity of 
taste, which allowed him to slip into the trivial, the tedious, the idly 
extravagant, and now and then the simply disgusting. Even at his 
best he seldom knows that last secret, the secret where to stop, and 
his prolixity and inequality together make even " beauties " from him 
hard to select. Another and still worse fault was more moral than 
literary, though strictly on the literary side of morals — an inexplicable 
tendency to make always rude and sometimes venomous attacks, 
under cover of anonymity, on persons who not merely deserved 
literary consideration, but were in some cases his private friends and 
even benefactors. 

John Gibson Lockhart was also deeply tinged with the aggressive, 
and sometimes scurrilous, personality of the time, but his taste was 
seldom to seek, and he has no proven crimes of literary lese-majestt 
or personal ingratitude to atone for. He was born at 
Cambusnethan in July 1794, was educated at Glasgow 
and Oxford, took a very good degree, travelled in Germany, and, 
returning to Edinburgh, practised at the bar. He began his connec- 
tion with letters by translating SchlegePs Lectures on History, joined 
heart and soul in the early sports and wars of Blackwood (which on 
more than one occasion nearly ended in bloodshed, and once did so, 
though he was not personally engaged), and in 1819 published, with 
some collaboration from Wilson, the amusing Smollett-like book on 
Edinburgh and its society called Peter''s Letters to Ids Kinsfolk.'^ He 
married Sophia Scott in 1820, and for some years lived, when not in 
Edinburgh, at Chiefswood, on the Abbotsford property, writing his 
four novels and his charming Spanish Ballads, with much miscel- 
laneous work for Blackwood. At the end of 1825 he was appointed 
to the editorship of the Quarterly, and, moving to London, wrote a 
great deal for the Review and a little for Fraser, began his famous 
Life of Scott in 1837, was made Auditor of the Duchy of Lancaster 
in 1843, 'i^d died in 1854, his health broken, partly by work, partly 
also by family troubles, for his wife and both his sons died before 
him. 

No one would deny that Lockhart's most certain and enduring 
title to literary remembrance lies in his Life of Scott, a book which 

1 The title was a play on tliat of Scott's account of his journey to tiae Con- 
tinent after Waterloo, Paul's Letters to /lis Kinsfolk. 



THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE 



indeed has an almost unmatched subject, and enjoys the half-illegiti- 
mate advantage of a great amount of matter from that subject's own 
hand. But unfortunate experience shows us how insufficient even 
such advantages are to make a good book ; and this is confessedly 
one of the best books in the world. For Lockhart has not only 
written it admirably ; he has not only exhibited, in his admissions 
and exclusions, that good feeling which was, as a rule, denied him by 
his enemies ; but he has also exhibited taste, judgment, sense of pro- 
portion, in a matter where the exercise of such sense is most difficult, 
to an extent hardly paralleled in any other biography.^ He is by no 
means a born novelist, though there are good, and almost great, things 
in his novels ; and, though he had an exquisite touch both of 
humour and pathos in verse, he hardly pretended to be a poet. By 
far the greatest expense of his literary power was upon criticism and 
miscellaneous essay-and-article-writing, of the kind generally classed 
as journalism. No collection of these writings of his has ever been 
made ; and he was universally believed in his lifetime — nor has he 
been quite cleared of the charge since — to have strained the privi- 
leges of an anonymous critic to, and sometimes beyond, their limit. 
It is certain, however, that even in those writings of his which his 
admirers most wish that he had not written, or hope that he did not 
write, an intellectual power and a faculty of sarcastic attack only 
surpassed by Swift appear. In less disputable matter Lockhart was 
always a competent, though sometimes a severe and rather prejudiced, 
critic. He accepted the earlier Romantic movement, but could 
never quite reconcile himself to its most luxuriant exuberance in 
Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, while his taste in prose also set dis- 
tinctly against the floridity reintroduced in different ways by De 
Quincey, Wilson, and Landor. 

The other main early contributors to Blackwood were lesser men. 
William Maginn (1793-1842), an Irishman of extraordinary versatility, 
much wit, and some scholarship, but tinged with too many of the 
weaknesses and vices of Bohemianism, had much to do with Maga, 
and more later with Fraser''s Magazine, to which latter he bore much 
the same relation as Wilson did to lUackivood itself. Maginn, who 
served as a model for Thackeray's Captain Shandon, undoubtedly 
possessed powers which, if concentrated and chastened, would have 
enabled him to produce work of very high quality, and as it is, some 
of his stories and verses {A Story without a Tail, Bob Burke's Duel, 
The Pewter (2uart, Maxims of Morgan O^Doherty, etc.) come little short 
of genius. He gathered round him in Fraser a set of contributors 

1 Lockhart exhibited the same qualities, on a smaller but not less difficult scale, 
in a long article, published later as a small book, on Theodore Hook, after the 
death of that ingenious Bohemian. 



THE NEW ESSAY 699 



almost more brilliant than those of Blackwood or of the London 
itself, ranging from Coleridge to Thackeray, and including Carlyle. 

James Hogg was also one of Maginn's men, but was of much 
more importance as supplying the figure of " the Shepherd " in the 
Notes, a personage with most of Hogg's faults, but with much 
more than his merits. ^ 

The London set, rather absurdly described by their Edinburgh 
rivals as " Cockney," was almost entirely independent, though De 
Quincey formed a kind of link between the two periodicals. The 
first editor of the London, John Scott, has only made a 
mark by his lamentable death, an imbroglio between 
himself and Lockhart ending in an actual duel between Scott and 
Lockhart's friend Christie, in which the former, by the mismanage- 
ment or bloodthirstiness of his second, fell. But the London had 
Thomas Hood for its sub-editor at one time, it actually introduced 
Lamb and De Quincey to essay-writing, and it served for years as 
the chief organ, though Leigh Hunt had his own, of the writers — 
sometimes, but not by any means always, anti-Tory in politics, and 
almost always Romantic in literature — who had their headquarters in 
London itself. Others of these, besides Hunt, made their chief 
appearances elsewhere, but they may be most satisfactorily treated 
here and together. 

Chai-les Lamb, who is perhaps more nearly unique than any 
other English writer outside the great poets, was a Londoner born, 
bred, and, by predilection as well as fate, resident. His birthday 
was 1 8th February 1775, his father was a lawyer's 
clerk, he was sent to Christ's Hospital, where he first "" 

fell into the society of Coleridge, and he was early provided for by 
a clerkship in the East Indian House. But his circumstances were 
most unfavourably affected by hereditary madness, which indeed 
never in his own case (except for a very short time) went beyond 
eccentricity, but which afflicted his beloved elder sister Mary so 
sorely that she murdered her mother in one fit of insanity, and was 
subject to others, with increasing frequency as she grew older, for the 
rest of her life. Lamb devoted himself (there was another brother 
more prosperous, but more selfish) entirely to her, and never married. 
It would appear that, even independently of the influence of Coleridge 
(which, however, like all that wonderful person's associates, he felt 
deeply), he had been attracted to the study of the Elizabethan, and 
in an even greater degree to that of the Jacobean and Caroline, 
writers. He wrote some early poems of little merit ; essayed an 

1 The story of Blackwood and its contributors, long partially and incorrectly 
known, has now been fully told in Mrs. Oliphant's Bouse of Blackwood (vols. i. 
and ii. Edinburgh, 1897). 



700 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

Elizabethan tragedy, John Woodvil^ which has more ; composed, 
with his sister, some Tales from Shakespeare, followed up in the same 
kind afterwards by the Adventures of Ulysses, which are admirable 
in a most dangerous kind ; and executed, with very brief critical 
notes which are jewels, two volumes of selections from the Elizabethan 
drama displaying wonderful sympathy and insight. 

It is, however, improbable that he would have been much more 
than a curiosity of literature — one of those not so very rare figures 
who make us say, "What a pity this man never found his way! " — or 
that at best his real worth would have been known only from his 
letters, which are numerous and charming, if the establishment of 
the LoHiloH Magazine followed as it was by his retirement from his 
clerkship on a pension, had not elicited from him the famous Essays 
of Elia. It is impossible to describe these; in point of subject they 
are literally de omnibus rebus et quibusdain aliis, the quaint fancy of 
the writer evolving, as he handles each of his more tangible matters 
of thought, fancies that never were anywhere, that never were to be 
anywhere, but in his own writings. Nor is his style more capable 
of exact definition. That a certain amount of his material is derived 
from actual loans supplied by the quainter writers of the mid-seven- 
teenth century, especially Burton, Fuller, and Browne, is perfectly 
true, as also that the essayist's debt to these for manner and method 
is even greater than his borrowings of actual matter or word. But 
a great deal remains which is simply Lamb himself and nobody 
else. Not only is he thus unique among English writers, but he is 
equally unique among the smaller and specially national body of 
English humourists. Nobody has ever succeeded in imitating him, 
even in his most obvious quaintnesses, while the blending of these 
quaintnesses with a pathos which is never mere sentiment is a 
secret not merely undiscovered yet by imitators, but escaping even 
any complete analysis — a Proteus never to be bound by the most 
enduring Ulysses, but fortunately amiable enough to bestow his 
wisdom and his graces without any such process. 

Henry James Leigh Hunt, who was born in 1784, and like Lamb 
was a Blue-coat boy, had the same introduction to official life (in his 
case in the War Office), but gave it up under the double seductions 
of laziness and literature. He had a brother who was a 
better man of business than himself, and the two set 
up a newspaper — the Examiner — which took strong Liberal and 
Opposition views. Hunt himself was imprisoned — a mere restric- 
tion of movement — for a libel on the Prince Regent in 1812. 
He survived this for nearly fifty years (he died in 1859), during 
which his abode was, except for one visit to Italy, wholly London 
and its neighbourhood, and his occupation unceasing literary labour. 



THE NEW ESSAY 701 



Neither in verse, in which he wrote a good deal {vide infra), nor 
in prose, in which he wrote much more, was Leigh Hunt exactly 
supreme. Want of time (for he always wrote for bread) prevented 
him as it was ; while want of taste would probably have prevented 
him in any case. But he was of the great miscelianists of English 
literature — a critic who, as far as the merely appreciative part of his 
business is concerned, has had few superiors ; and a writer of the 
purely general essay, the " article," which was more and more hitting 
popular taste, and which has never lost it since, after a fashion which 
owed little to any forerunners, and has taught much to scores, almost 
to hundreds, of followers. Hunt tried longer work in novel and 
otherwise, but was quite unfit for it : he was a journalist and essayist 
born. But he inclined towards the older rather than the younger 
types of these in being prone to write wholly or mainly by himself. 
He was the sole or the principal contributor to the Reflector (1810), 
the Indicator (1819-21), the Companion (1828), the New Tatler 
(1830-32), and the London Journal (1834-35). His work in these 
and other things was at different times rearranged and diversified 
with fresh matter or presented for the first time in different forms — 
Men, Women, and Books, A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, Wit 
and Hiimour, Imagination and Fancy, etc. He wrote a pleasing 
Autobiography, and an admirable book on London, The Town. But 
always, and first of all, he is a miscellanist and a writer of essays. 

Lamb was an exquisite, and Leigh Hunt a very agreeable, critic, 
the former in regard to a limited and rather haphazard group of 
personal predilections of his own, the latter in a sphere very credit- 
ably wide, though determined rather by instinct than by reason. 
The third great member of the ''Cockney" school, though even his 
criticism was too much vitiated by extra-literary prejudice, was far 
greater as a critic than either — was indeed one of the very greatest 
critics who have ever lived. He was also — unlike his companions — 
a critic, or at least an essayist, merely, though he wrote a philosophical 
book of no great merit at the beginning of his career, and a historical 
one of less at the end of it. WiUiam Hazlitt, who was ^^ ,. 

, ,T-i ■ OTT Hazlitt. 

of Irish extraction, was born at Maidstone in 1778. He 
w-as rather early thrown into contact with Coleridge, bestowed when 
young much attention on art, but finally settled down to literary work 
in London, afterwards at Winterslow on Salisbury Plain, where his 
first wife had some property, and then in 181 2 in London again. 
Nor did he move his headquarters till his death in 1830. He 
seems to have enjoyed his life, but it was not what would generally 
be called a fortunate one. Both his marriages were unlucky, the 
first ending in a regular divorce, the second in his wife's leaving him 
after a short time. His temper, even by personal and political 



702 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

friends, was found to be almost intolerable ; and though he only 
shared with some very amiable persons the abuse of violent 
partisans on the side opposed to Liberalism, he provoked, rivalled, 
and more than requited their acrimony, indulging in the most 
ferocious abuse not merely of personal literary foes, but of men like 
Scott and Wellington, who were entirely out of his sphere, and had 
certainly never provoked him in any way. 

This waspishness (to use an unfair word, for the wasp never 
stings unless meddled with) invalidates a small part even of his 
criticism, as, for instance, in reference not merely to Burke and 
other Conservative writers, not merely to contemporaries of Liberal 
principles, like Shelley, who were gentlemen, and therefore obnoxious 
to his democratic envy, but to inoffensive antiquities like the 
monarchical poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He 
was also rather insufficiently equipped with knowledge of other lan- 
guages and literatures. But, despite these drawbacks, his collected 
critical lectures and essays on English literature, as well as a good 
many independent essays, contain perhaps the very finest work of 
their kind — free from the tentative and experimental character of 
Dryden, from the limits and blinkers of the eighteenth century, from 
the scrappiness and vagueness of Coleridge, from the crotchet of 
Lamb, from the lack of intellectual quality in Hunt, and from the 
sometimes arbitrary eclecticism of Mr. Matthew Arnold. 

Besides this great accomplishment, Hazlitt was a very good critic 
of art, though in a less technical kind than that which has since 
become fashionable, and such a master of the miscellaneous essay 
that his faculty for this has by some been put even above his purely 
critical power. In his own time Hazlitt, though disliked and abused, 
was a writer of weight ; in the generation succeeding his death he 
was. save by a few of the best judges, such as Thackeray, rather 
undervalued and neglected ; and it is only of late years that he has 
been restored, and perhaps even yet not fully restored, to his proper 
place. 

Thomas De Quincey, the one link of great importance between 
the hostile camps, was born in the suburbs of Manchester in the year 
1785. His father died when he was quite young, but left consider- 
able property, his share of which De Quincey afterwards 

De Quincey. . • j r • . j- r. 1 1 1 

got nd 01 m ways not discreditable so much as eccentric 
— by exercises of literary generosity (he gave Coleridge a large sum), 
by the most reckless anticipations, by neglecting to adopt any 
profession, and by such merely wilful oddities as disqualifying him- 
self for the valuable Hulme Exhibition from Manchester Grammar 
School to Brasenose College by running away from the former place 
of learning, and tlien going to Oxford after all at his own expense. 



THE NEW ESSAY 703 



The college he chose was Worcester, where he resided for a long- 
time, but where he took no degree. He settled after some years in 
the Lakes, married, and lived quietly for twenty years, after which he 
moved to Edinburgh, living there or at Lasswade till 1859, when 
he died, the last of his generation except Landor. The singular 
adventures of his errant youth, and the results of his habit of opium- 
eating, have been told by himself in various forms and places, 
specially in his Autobiography and in the earlier and more famous 
Co?ifessions of an English Opiuni-Eate7', which first appeared in the 
London I\Taga::tne during the course of the year 1821. He had 
published nothing of any importance before, though he had been a 
very deep and wide student, and had helped Wordsworth to prepare 
his " Note on the Convention of Cintra" for press. 

Having thus made discovery of his ability for literary composition, 
and being, moreover, urged by the insufficiency of his income, De 
Quincey, for nearly the last forty years of his life, devoted himself to 
writing with an untiring energy, the due rewards of which were to a 
great extent lost to him by his incurably unpractical ways in almost 
all respects. But towards the end of his life he made a very large 
collection of reprinted articles, which (further enlarged since his death) 
is perhaps the most important in bulk and the most varied in subject 
of any collection of Miscellanea in English. De Ouincey's merits, 
indeed, were so numerous and so great that only the presence, side 
by side with them, of very serious defects of a peculiarly annoying 
character has kept him out of one of the very highest positions in 
literature — to which position, indeed, he has been actually admitted 
by some. He had a singular combination of exact scholarship with 
wide desultory reading ; an entirely original faculty of narrative ; a 
rare gift for exposition, either in summary of fact or concentration of 
argument; an intensely individual, though fitful, humour; and a 
hardly matched — a certainly unsurpassed — command of gorgeous 
rhetorical style. Of this last, indeed, he was very well aware, and 
was misled by it into the critical error of regarding all plain prose 
style as inferior, instead of, as it really is, in perfection the equal of 
the most ornate. 

On the other hand, De Quincey was liable to accesses of tedious 
digression and "rigmarole," which make it sometimes impossible 
to read him through ; his purely critical faculty was singularly 
untrustworthy, and almost as likely to lead him wrong as to lead him 
right ; his humour, when it ceased to be grim or dreamy, had a 
distressing habit of falling into clumsy jocularity and horseplay. 
Although, therefore, his works, voluminous as they are, have been 
very widely read, there have always been dissidents in the apprecia- 
tion of them, and this dissidence has rather gained strength recently. 



704 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

It is not, however, of much importance ; for though sound criticism 
will never fail to take note of his weaknesses, such things as the 
Confessions and their appendices (especially the splendid •' Ladies of 
Sorrow"), the Autobiography, and the essays on The English Mail 
Coach, Murder as One of the Fine Arts.foan of Arc, The Spanish Nun, 
Tiie Ccesars, and a good many others, are quite sure of their 
place. De Quincey's historical position, however, depends less upon 
details than upon the fact that he was one of the very first to attempt, 
and one of the most successful in achieving, one of the great turns 
in the long race of English prose style — the nineteenth-century 
reaction from plain to ornate prose-writing. And it is significant and 
interesting that, as was also the case with another reformer, Landor, 
he found his easiest and most successful exercising ground in dreams. 
For a hundred and fifty years the eflfort of prose, even in the mouths 
and pens of men like Gibbon and Johnson, had been to be first of 
all practical — its aim was now to be first of all imaginative. No 
doubt part of the attempt was due to the Wordsworthian heresy, 
which De Quincey strongly shared, of the non-necessity of metre in 
poetry ; but this did not matter. The reformers may sometimes 
have intended to write prose-poetry, which is a bastard and tainted 
in blood ; but they really produced a true new cross in imaginative 
prose. 

Landor himself, technically no essayist, but, like some writers of the 
seventeenth century, illustrating the essay-nisns in a slightly altered 
form, belongs to this chapter not merely on that ground. For with 
Wilson and De Quincey he is the earliest, and in some ways 
' he is almost by himself the greatest, of the reformers, or, 
as some would say, revolutionisers, of prose style. His prose work was 
not early, and it took a form not very convenient, but maintained with 
characteristic obstinacy by the artist — that of Imaginary Conversations, 
reaching in their total a very great bulk. The first collection of these 
appeared in 1831, when their author was fifty-six, and this was 
succeeded by others, sometimes under the general title, sometimes 
specialised as Examination of Shakespeare (1836), Pericles and 
.Ispasia, The Pentameroji. The formal and the material value of these 
things are very far apart, and they cannot be praised without qualifica- 
tion even in respect of form. For such conversations a dramatic 
command of character would seem to be necessary, and Landor had 
none ; humour likewise — and Landor's humour was '' a terrible minus 
quantity"; detachment — and Landor was a bundle of prejudices, at 
times furiously voiceful and never quite silent. But his astonishing 
gift of style and, despite his crotchets and his too frequent silliness, 
his attachment to the great standard models of conduct in action and 
proportion in expression convey to them an extraordinary charm. 



THE NEW ESSAY 705 



Standing as he does at the turning of the way in prose, and indeed 
in literature generally, he manages to combine classical grace, dignity, 
adjustment, and even not infrequently measure, with Romantic colour, 
suggestion, variety, to an extent wonderful and sometimes consum- 
mate. He never quite succeeds in being easy, and he never has the 
very least imaginative wizardry. He is stilted beside Addison, prosaic 
beside Browne ; but as much of either as would mix is in him, and the 
blend is not a little delightful. 

William Cobbett, older than most of these men, and a strong 
contrast, in his bringing-up and circumstance, to their mostly academic 
education and their usual position in society, gives a yet more special 
contrast with Landor, in his style, the perfection of the 

, , ,. , , . Cobbett. 

vernacular made literary — the last great representative 
of the line of Latimer and Bunyan. Cobbett was born in 1762, and 
died a member of the Reformed Parliament in 1835. He was the 
son of a farmer-labourer, served for some time in the army, where he 
became sergeant, but resided in America for the later years of the 
eighteenth century, beginning his newspaper experiences there with 
Peter Porciipine''s Journal, and writing fully up to his title. Soon 
after his return to England in 1800, appeared his Weekly Register^ 
in which, under difficulties (including one imprisonment and another 
exile to the United States), as well as in a crowd of books little and 
big, he continued, for the rest of his life, to vent political ideas, some- 
times generous, often mischievous, nearly always unpractical, in ad- 
mirable English. Besides direct politics, grammar, Church history, 
the currency, potatoes (their badness), maize (its goodness), and a 
thousand other things, occupied Cobbett's pen ; while his Rural Rides 
give some of the most vivid, if not the most ornate, description in 
the language. 

The great names of Macaulay and Carlyle, hardly junior to most 
here, will be treated under another head, though both were essayists, 
and perhaps essayists first of all. Those of some others (of whom 
Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), son of the poet, inheritor of his 
weaknesses, but not so very far removed from his ability both as 
poet and as critic, is the most important) belong to a fuller story 
than this. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 

Southey's prose — Historical writing: Mitford, Roscoe, and others — Hallam — 
Milman — Arnold, Grote, and Thirlwall — Mackintosh and Bentham — 
Macaulay 

It has seemed desirable to separate from the essayists, though in 
some cases they were the same persons, those prose-writers who in 
the older forms of elaborate composition — history, philosophical and 
scientific discussion, theological writing, and so forth — composed 
books of substantive importance during the first thirty years or so of 
the century. The newer styles, ornate, abrupt, and what not, were 
slower in making irruption into these dignified regions ; perhaps it 
may be said that a stouter resistance was opposed there by the 
publisher-guardians of the gates. Siwtor Resartits could find no 
home except in a magazine, and was welcomed dubiously even there ; 
the Confessions of an Opiiun-Eater would certainly have appeared at 
its author's own expense or not at all, had it been compelled to 
appear as a book first. If we take Macaulay as the last j^opular 
author of an older type in style, though he lived far into the Victorian 
era, Carlyle as the first of the new. though he was born before Macau- 
lay and not much less than half a century before Queen Victoria 
came to the throne, we shall find the division useful as affecting this 
Book and the next. For Carlyle first broke, as Macaulay. among men 
of commanding literary position, almost last sustained, the exclusive 
prestige of the older academic style in matter of book-writing. 

Many of the essayists and journalists mentioned in the last 
chapter, notably Lockhart, were themselves indisposed to the more 
anarchic fashions of style. But the greatest practitioner of a style, 

not indeed old-fashioned, but of the older fashion, was 
prose!' ^ undoubtedly Southey. It has sometimes been supposed 

that those who make much of style imagine the existence 
of some single individual form of prose-writing, to be kept, like the 
standard weights and measures, in a literary Tower of London, and 

706 



CHAP. IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 707 

not deviated from except under peril of the law. This, of course, 
would be an entire mistake. Almost every subject has a style of its 
own, and almost every writer has a style of his own ; though it is pos- 
sible to range them all in the two great divisions of plain and ornate, 
and perhaps in some minor ones. But few will dispute that, if there 
could be such a form of style, if it were possible, by segregating 
individuality, to arrive at the general idea, then Southey has come 
as near as any Englishman to the ideal of prose-writing on the less 
fla)nboyant side. 

Not that his own writing is by any means monotonous, or even 
extremely uniform, in character. He had to play many parts with 
his pen — his Histories of Brasil (i8io-ig) and of The Peninsular 
War (1822-32), his historical biographies of Nelson (1813 — his 
masterpiece), CowjDer, Wesley (1820), and others, the vast mass of 
his articles and reviews, the enormous bulk of his private letters, of 
which the ten published volumes probably represent only the smaller 
part, the curious miscellany of T/ie Doctor, and such ditTerent work 
as hi?, Book of t lie Church (1824), his Colloquies (1829), his Oniniana, 
his Letters from Spain and Portugal, with the later Espriella (1812), 
required, and duly received, different treatment. In the private letters 
and The Doctor (1834), a deliberate fatrasie, as the French called it 
in the sixteenth century, of reading, humour, and what not, he coins 
words liberally, and admits foreign languages with almost macaronic 
license. In his full-dress work he is almost Ctesarian in his refusal 
of the unusual word, and his adherence to the best (not the most 
colourless and invertebrate) tradition of eighteenth-century style. 
But always he has the much talked of, the indefinable, but the at 
once perceptible, quality of "purity." He adjusts the scholarly 
and the vernacular, the business-like and the ornamental, with an 
unerring calculation. He is, in short, the Addison, and far more than 
the Addison, of the early nineteenth century ; and it is a distinct 
misfortune that more of its writers have not given their days and 
nights to the reading of him. 

Sir Humphry Davy in science. Dr. Chalmers in theology, and 
others in other branches would claim notice in a larger space or in a 
more confined range than the present book allows ; but for our pres- 
ent purpose the important subject of history, which has 
been as much the prevailing subject of the nineteenth writing: Mit- 
century, in prose on the great scale, as theology was of '^^'^'^^ ^thtf °^' 
the seventeenth and philosophical speculation of certain 
kinds in the eighteenth, will probably suffice. It was not merely the 
example and the fame of Gibbon which tempted writers to this par- 
ticular branch — the exciting and important events of the French 
Revolution invited treatment of contemporary themes, and the new- 



7o8 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book X 

born passion for investigating the long-neglected archives of different 
nations necessitated the correction of the older current histories and 
facilitated the production of new. In the last half of the eighteenth 
century were born more distinguished historians than had been con- 
tributed by the whole course of English literary history. And there 
was a curious progression of excellence in the order of time. William 
Mitford ( 1 744-1 827) was a man of fortune and of rather unusual 
cultivation, who left the first really noteworthy book upon the theory 
of English metre. ^ His principal work was a History of Greece^ 
written between 1784 and 1 814, and very well written, though injured 
somewhat by a very strong political prejudice and by some mistakes 
of fact. 

William Roscoe, who was born in 1753, and saw the reign of 
William IV., devoted himself to modern, not to ancient, history, and 
produced, in the Life of Lorenzo de JMedici (1796) and Leo X. (1805), 
handbooks of the Italian Renaissance which have not yet grown 
obsolete. Sharon Turner (1768-1847), John Lingard (1772-185 1), 
and Francis Cohen, who took the name of Palgrave (1788-1861), 
and was knighted, turned their attention, as it was high time some 
one should, to English history from a somewhat less superficial point 
of view than Hume's. Lingard produced a general history of Eng- 
land far in advance of anything yet written in point of scholarly 
accuracy. Turner and Palgrave attacked the origins, which had 
hardly received any new light since the investigations of Elizabethan 
and seventeenth-century authorities, Turner taking chiefly Anglo- 
Saxon, Palgrave chiefly Anglo-Norman, times as his province. Sir 
James Mackintosh (i 765-1 832) bestowed a good deal of his some- 
what inadequately represented ability and learning upon history ; and 
Sir William Napier (1785-1860), with some passion and prejudice, 
but with the most intimate knowledge of his subject, and showing a 
command of vivid literary representation excessively rare, if not 
almost unknown, in a professional historian, gave, in 1828-40, his 
famous History of the Peninsular War. 

All these men produced historical work which deserves esteem, 
some of them work deserving of something much beyond it ; and the 
general appetite for history in readers, and readiness to gratify that 
appetite in writers, may be judged from the fact that the poets Scott, 
Moore, and Campbell, the critic Hazlitt, and other men whose voca- 
tion did not directly place them under the invocation of Clio, com- 
posed extensive books of the kind. But the art and science of the 
historian had not been so well represented in any man since Gibbon as 
they were represented in Henry Hallam (1777 or 1778-1859). He was 

1 An Enquiry into the Principles of the Harmony of Language, 2nd od. 1804. 
Tlie first, in cruder form, had been published some thirty years before. 



CHAP. IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 709 

a son of the Dean of Bristol, passed through Eton, Christ Church, and 
the Middle Temple, and became a bencher of his Inn; but he made 
no figure in practice, having private means, and becoming 
a Government servant pretty early. He had written for 
the Edinburgh Review, being a decided, though not violent. Whig, 
for many years before he made his appearance as a historian with 
his View of tJic State of Europe diiri/ig the Middle Ages (181 8). In 
1827 he published his principal work. The Constitutional History of 
England from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George //., 
and in 1839 ^is Introduction to the Literature of Europe during the 
Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. Besides his own 
work, and his wide literary friendships, Hallam had an additional 
and strong, though indirect, connection with literature through the 
fact that his son, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833, was the 
intimate friend of Tennyson, and by his death gave birth to hi 
ISIeinoriani. 

Hallam was a good deal over-praised during his life as a critic, 
for he was the oracle of one triumphant and self-satisfied party, and 
was less than usually obnoxious to the other. The strange slowness, 
moreover, with which English criticism mastered the comparative 
method, obtained for his literary judgments, both in his own and 
other literatui-es, not merely during his life but for many years after 
his death, an authority considerably greater than that which really 
belonged to them. For Hallam came a little too early to avail him- 
self of that rediscovery of its earlier treasures which every nation in 
Europe made as a consequence of the Romantic movement ; he was 
very partially in sympathy with that movement ; and though he 
could understand he could not love — a nearly fatal disqualification 
for a literary critic or even a literary historian. But this disqualifi- 
cation does not attach to the historian proper, whatever it may do to 
the historical biographer; and in his history proper Hallam's work 
was of extreme value. Even his Whig prepossessions did not 
interfere with this : because he was never unfair, and his prejudice 
merely gave him a solid and honestly confessed basis on which to 
take his stand, and from which to take his view. He never, like his 
great pupil Macaulay, succumbed to suppression or suggestion, and 
a simple allowance for the idola of the Whig tradition will almost 
always extract from his work a trustworthy and reasonable statement 
of historic fact. He occupies among English historians a station 
much higher than that of Guizot, and not much below that of Ranke, 
among foreign, and his capacity for mere writing, though it did not 
give him brilliancy or charm, permitted him always a scholarlv 
adequacy and competence. 

Very like Hallam, but something of a poet, and as a poet 



7IO THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

possessing the touch of passion which Hallam rather fatally lacked, 
was Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868). Like Hallam he was an 
Eton and Oxford man, his college being Brasenose, 
and in his University he became not merely Bampton 
Lecturer but Professor of Poetry. Not much general memory of his 
poems survives, but his tragedy of Fazio was perhaps the very best 
of the somewhat artificial school succeeding the alternate rant and 
drivel of the eighteenth century, and some of his hymns are among 
the best in English. His literary exercises included contributions 
to the Quarterly Review ; but it was not till he was nearly forty 
(for he had had parochial work in addition to his other occupa- 
tions) that, in 1829, he published his first historical book, T/ie 
History of the Jews. He improved upon this in T/ie History of 
Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism ( 1 840) ; but both books 
were quite put in the shade by his History of Latin Cliristianity, 
which appeared in 1856, the year of his grand climacteric. In his 
earlier work he had relied too much on that uncritical adoption of 
German criticism which has been the origin, and the destruction, of 
the reputation of so many Englishmen. In the History of Latin 
Oiristianity he relied on solid reading, not of commentaries, but of 
text, on the inherent powers of a great subject, and on a style 
which, though it has no very salient mannerism, combines ease 
with dignity, and neither wearies nor irritates the reader. 

During the same decade were born three historians who busied 
themselves with classical history — Dr. Arnold (1795-1842), who 
devoted himself to the Roman annals; Mr. Grote (1794-1871) and 
. . , „ Bishop Thirl wall (i 797-1 875), who busied themselves 
and ' with Greek. The first was born in the Isle of Wight, 
Thirlwall. ^j^^ ^^,gj^(. ^Q Winchester and to Corpus, Oxford. He 
became Fellow of Oriel at a very early age, took private pupils for 
some years, and was then made headmaster of Rugby, and later 
Professor of Modern History at Oxford. The last appointment was 
made too late for him to do much in it ; the earlier entirely revolu- 
tionised Rugby itself, and had a great indirect effect on all English 
schools. Historically he fell into the same pitfall which had ensnared 
Milman (while he did not, like Milman, live to get out of it) by 
paying too much attention to Niebuhr. He was, however, a man of 
vigorous though prejudiced intellect, with a cramping theory that 
" everything was an open - question " ; and in style he was not 
unworthy to be the father of the author of Essays in Criticism. 
Indeed, as far as style went, he stood ahead of both the Hellenists, 
and very far ahead of Grote. This latter, a London banker, a 
member of Parliament, and an extreme though rather theoretical 
Radical, was in the latter capacity chagrined by Mitford's unfavour- 



CHAP. IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 711 

able sketcli of Greek democracy, and set himself to draw a counter 
picture. He had good knowledge, and was one of the earliest 
historians to " realise " events in the modern manner, treating, for 
instance, the case of Cleon very much as if he had been backing 
that worthy for a seat in an English constituency. But the form of 
his work is extremely defective, its scale is enormous and tiresome, 
and its perpetual advocacy makes the reader long for the time when 
the " hoarse Bar " will be silent and the Bench will speak. 

With a little more good luck the desideratum might have been sup- 
plied by Connop Thirl wall, whose History appeared before Grote's, 
and was in the popular estimate superseded by it, but who has 
all the qualities of the historian (except that of vivid realisation) in 
a far superior degree. Thirlwall, an extraordinarily clever child, a 
ripe scholar later, and to the end of his life a man of the first intel- 
lectual and moral excellence, was born in Stepney, was educated at 
Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, passed from the law 
to the Church, held a country living for some years, and in 1840 was 
promoted to the see of St. David's, which he held for half a life- 
time. That Thirlwall was not much less strong a Liberal than 
Grote, and, like Grote, that he imported some purpose, though less, 
into his history, did not do much harm, for his mind was almost as 
little partisan as Hallam's, and the same moderate correction for the 
longitude will set it right. But though his style is infinitely more 
correct than Grote's, and possesses dignity and even some grace, it 
is not in any sense inspiring, and no history that is to be more than 
document can afford to dispense with charm or vigour of style. And 
partly through this want, partly owing to the character of its writer, 
the book is far too destitute of the picturesqueness which, easily as it 
may be overdone, is a si)ie qua noii of a great history. 

Three somewhat older men may be mentioned before we come to 
the final name of the chapter — Mackintosh, Bentham, and James 
Mill. Mill (1773-1836), the chief propagator of Bentham's philoso- 
phy, the historian (with great and, perhaps, deliberate ^^^ j.;^^ ^j^ 
inaccuracy) of British India, and the possessor of a style and 
as crabbed as his master's and as unamiable as his own ^"' ^^' 
character, deserves slight mention. Sir James Mackintosh was born 
in Inverness-shire in 1765, and was educated at the Universities of 
Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He took his degree in medicine, but 
went to the London bar, and wrote politics for some time before 
his VindicicB Gallica — a Jacobin apology in his twenty-sixth year 
produced as an answer to Burke — attracted the attention of the 
extremer Whigs. He lectured at Lincoln's Inn in 1799, defended 
Peltier, Bonaparte's enemy, in 1803, became Recorder of Bombay in 
1804, returned, after spending eight years in India, to sit in Parlia- 



712 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

ment and profess Law and History at Haileybury, and died in 1832, 
just too early to reap the fruits of the Liberal triumph. He wrote on 
philosophy, on politics, on law, on history ; and the worst things to 
be said about him are that he wrote on each too much like a pro- 
fessor or one or more of the others, and that his style, though with 
considerable mannered grace of its own, is too florid, and smacks too 
much of eighteenth-century thinness draped with Johnsonian phrase. 
He never concentrated himself either in subject or form, and has left 
nothing that does his reputation thorough justice. Yet the defence of 
Peltier is one of the very best and most literary of forensic pleadings in 
English, and the Dissertation on Etiiics is a masterpiece of exoteric 
philosophical exposition. 

Jeremy Bentham, who died in the same year with Mackintosh, 
but was born much earlier, in 1 748, was a Londoner, was educated at 
Westminster and Queen's College, Oxford, and entered an Inn of 
Court. His instincts and interests were indeed almost wholly legal, 
but he was dispensed by private means from the necessity of prac- 
tising, and, unlike most lawyers, perhaps because he did not practise, 
he advocated legal and other reforms of a mostly destructive char- 
acter. Opinion, very unfavourable to him at first, came round to a 
large extent, though the wheel is now turning again, and even his 
demonstration against the Usury Laws, long pronounced unanswer- 
able, is doubted now. But literature looks to the way in which he 
enforced his views, not to their nature or purport, their triumph or 
decay. Here he may be credited with vigour and clearness of 
thought, which very seldom finds a corresponding vigour or clearness 
of expression. Even in his most purely critical work, as where he 
deals with popular fallacies, the form is always below the occasion, 
and where he is expounding instead of pulling to pieces, the want of 
clearness and of style is still more painfully apparent. 

The last author of first-rate importance in the older prose, though 

he gave it a colour and form which made him more popular than any 

innovator, was Thomas Babington Macaulay, who played more than 

one part both in life and in literature, but was, on the 

acau ay. ^^j^^jg ^j^ j jj^ j^jg heart, more of a historian than of any- 
thing else. He was born at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, on 
25th October 1800; his father, Zachary, was a very strong partisan 
of negro emancipation. Macaulay went to no public school, but was 
sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he made many friends, 
took the Chancellor's Prize for English verse twice, and (though not 
without some oljstacle, from his dislike to mathematics) a high 
degree and a Fellowship. He had been born to affluence, but his 
father was unlucky, and Macaulay had at first to look mainly to his 
Fellowship for actual, and to the Bar for future, support. He had, 



CHAi>. IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 713 

however, begim literature early, contributing, with Praed and others, 
to Knight's Quarterly Magazine. At about the age of five-and- 
twenty he caught the attention of Jeffrey by his famous "• Milton " 
Essay and according to the tradition then still prevailing was 
eagerly welcomed by the Whigs, not merely as a useful literary hand, 
but as a political candidate of promise. He was put into the pocket 
borough of Calne, championed the Reform Bill, and might probably 
have had office at home ; but being both poor and prudent, he pre- 
ferred to lay a more solid foundation for his career by accepting 
the post of legal member of the Indian Council, which gave him a 
chance of large savings. He remained abroad about five years, 
and during that time made himself independent. On his return 
he became member for Edinburgh, and shortly after Secretary for 
War, while later he was Paymaster-General. He lost his seat for 
a time, but recovered it in 1852, became Lord Macaulay of Roth- 
well in 1857, and died of heart disease at the end of 1859, on 28th 
December. 

His verse, which is very noteworthy, if not absolutely of the first 
class, will be noticed in the next chapter ; his essays, speeches, 
and History of England concern us here. All this prose work is 
permeated by a not very complex, but extremely interesting, im- 
portant, and distinct idiosyncrasy of character in spirit and in form. 
Macaulay's thought and his style were even more intimately con- 
nected than is usual. The former only concerns us indirectly, and 
in so far as it helps to explain the latter. Macaulay was the very 
incarnation of the prevailing character of Englishmen between 
Waterloo and the Indian Mutiny — a hater of abstract principles, 
transcendentalism, the vaguer forms of poetry, ceremonial and tradi- 
tional religion ; a Whig-Liberal, less on any coherent theory than 
from a belief that the Whig-Liberal predominance during the 
eighteenth century had made England great, and kept her at once 
from the excesses of absolutism and of republics ; clear and trenchant 
but extremely narrow in thought ; contemptuous of all things and 
periods, such as the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance, which 
he had not taken the trouble to understand ; sure that all things 
worth understanding could be understood easily ; incapable of admit- 
ting anything but downright estimates of character; an uncom- 
promising partisan, and strongly tainted by that vice of the practical 
politican which makes him a little unscrupulous as to the means by 
which his party wins ; not primarily interested in literature as litera- 
ture, but cultivated enough to be enthusiastic about such things as 
appealed to him ; compensating his liberalism in politics by a rather 
obstinate conservatism in style, and even to some extent in philos- 
ophy ; a little exposed to the charge of shallowness, and sharply 



714 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

limited in almost every direction ; healthy but imperfectly developed ; 
acute but incapable of comprehending the intangible. 

In his essays, literary and political, and in the enormously pro- 
portioned history ^ which, intended to cover the period from the 
Exclusion Bill to a point not clearly signified, but apparently as late 
as the French Revolution, did not actually reach in its four large 
volumes the close of William's reign, this spirit finds its expression 
with a rare fidelity. He is not a consummate literary critic, for, though 
he liked almost all the best things from Shakespeare to Shelley, it was 
never for their actually literary characteristics that he liked them. 
But he has a wonderful power of representing historical events of the 
most complex kind ; and, subject to his own limitations, he can grasp 
and present a man nearly as well as a scene. No one before him 
had so well applied to history the combined forensic and debating 
gifts of putting a case intelligibly to the hearer in the way in which 
you wish him to decide it ; and it is fair to say that no one had 
given more untiring labour, or used his labour more felicitously, in 
mastering all details of place, time, and circumstance. And the 
mere style, learnt partly from Hazlitt, partly from Hallam, and with 
a little of Gibbon in it, in which Macaulay conveyed his meaning, 
was again absolutely faithful to his mode of thought. It was arranged 
with but few appliances except the consecrated antithetic balance, was 
" classical " in diction, and only ornamented as far as the vocabulary 
goes by a very liberal use of proper names, slightly fatiguing by its 
" snip-snap," as Brougham's sharp-sighted jealousy called it, but 
perfectly clear. On Coleridge's certainly inadequate principle that the 
whole virtue of style is to convey the author's meaning, no style can 
rank much higher. Suggestion it has none : it cannot, in the subtle 
way which the greater styles use, supply keys to unlock and power to 
set working, in the reader's mind, chambers of machinery supplemental 
to the author's own. But what Macaulay meant the reader under- 
stands at once and to the very full ; he feels with him or revolts against 
him with an instant response ; there is not a foot-pound of effort lost, 
not a stroke thrown away. And the general public, which was 
mainly in tune with him, answered by buying Macaulay as no his- 
torian had been bought before or has been bought since, and by 
making him, as essayist and historian together, the most popular and 
widely read prose author of England who has written other things 
than prose fiction. 

iThe 7isS(7vs, all contributed to the Edinburgh, were collectively published in 
1843 ; vols. i. and ii. of the History appeared in 1848, vols. iii. and iv. in 1855. 
Some speeches, biographies from the EucyclopcBdia Dritaiuiica, etc., have to be 
added. 



CHAPTER V 

THE MINOR POETS OF 1800-183O 

Rogers — Leigh Hunt and Hogg — A group of minors — Elliott, Mrs. Hemans, and 
" L. E. L." — Hood — Praed — Macaulay — Hawker and Barnes — Hartley 
Coleridge — Sir H. Taylor — Home — Darley — Beddoes 

It has seemed worth while to deal separately with the minor poets of 
the Romantic movement, both in consequence of the great length of the 
first chapter of this Book, and because some of them at least form a 
well-separated group of transition between the great school of the first 
quarter of the century and the Victorians proper. Of these were a 
few who almost deserve to have been mentioned earlier, and at their 
head may perhaps be placed the long overrated name of 
Samuel Rogers ( 1765-185 5). Had Rogers been a poor 
man of letters, his poetical claims would have received only the 
slightest attention. His first verse appeared in 1786, and showed 
absolutely nothing of the '' false dawn " of that period ; his Pleasures 
of Memory, still quite antique, in 1792; and he followed these up 
at long and easy intervals with others, the chief of which is Italy 
(1822). Rogers was a rich man, he was hospitably given, and a 
great ''lioniser," and whether he was or was not as unamiable as 
he has been sometimes represented, he could and did use his tongue 
most formidably. In his later years, too, he became an interesting 
link, or rather bridge, covering one whole literary generation, and con- 
necting its forerunner and follower. Moreover, he had just enough 
of romantic interest to vary and freshen his subjects. But there was 
none of the new music in him, little of the new pictorial power, and 
absolutely nothing of the new spirit. 

Classification among minor poets would perhaps have been not 
inuch less disagreeable to the apparent nonchalance of Leigh Hunt 
(1784-1859) than to the uneasy vanity of James Hogg 
(1770-183 5), and probably the admirers of both will resent ^'^ Hogg. ^" 
it for them. Yet on general and comparative grounds, 
it is inevitable, and there are even major poets than either in this 

715 



7i6 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

very chapter. Both have been mentioned before, more particu- 
larly Hunt. His only poem of any size is the Story of Rimini, 
written during his prison sojourn in 1812 and published after his 
liberation in 1816. His pervading faults are obvious in it, and 
served as a main, if not an entire, justification for the violent attacks 
of the Tory critics on his taste and morals. But he had, from his 
study of seventeenth-century poets of the school that began with 
Browne and ended with Chamberlayne, revived enjatnbenient, and with 
it a good deal of their florid ornament and narrative ease, so that 
he set on a promising path poets so much greater than himself as 
Keats and Shelley. And in some of his smaller pieces, scattered 
over different books and long ranges of time, he has enriched the 
anthologies with pleasant and occasionally excellent things in sonnet 
and snatch, in rondeau and romance. But though he is credited with 
some half-score volumes of verse, from the early (and worthless) 
Juvenilia to the Stories in Verse published in 1855, but four years 
before his death, the total does not make a large volume, and the 
really valuable things go in an extremely small one. 

Hogg (whose nam de guerre of ''the Ettrick Shepherd " was justi- 
fied, for he was first a shepherd and then a sheep farmer during the 
whole of his life) was, in so far as his shorter life allowed, equally 
persistent and much more voluminous. Besides the extensive pro.se 
work already referred to, he published scattered verse early. The 
Mountain Bard in 1803, The Forest Alinstrel in 18 10, The Queen'' s 
Wal;e in 181 3, and later Mador of the Moor, The Pilgrims of the 
Sun, The Border Garland, besides some of his best things foisted as 
Jacobite ballads, songs in Blackwood, etc. His very best pieces — 
" Kilmeny," " The Boy's Song," " Donald MacGillavry," and a few 
more — would, if they were preserved alone, almost justify his own idea 
of himself as '' King of the Mountain and Fairy School of poetry," 
though not his other idea, that he was master of poetry on the great 
narrative scale. Take these comparatively few things out, and the 
large remainder of his work is often scarcely third-rate, and some- 
times quite beneath criticism. 

But we must become briefer. The Montgomeries, James (1771- 
1854) and Robert (1807-1855), belong to this group. James was 
the better poet ; but it is questionable whether Macaulay's famous 
martyrdom of Robert will not give him the longer life 
ofmi^nors. ^^ a name. Bernard Barton (i 784-1 849) was an amia- 
ble and fairly long-lived Quaker versifier, Henry Kirke 
White ( 1 785-1 806) an amiable and very short-lived Anglican poet- 
aster. Tannahill (1774-1810), Cunningham (1785-1842), Motherwell 
(1797-1835), Tennant ( 1 784-1 848), Thom (1798-1848), D. M. Moir, 
the "Delta" of Blackwood (1788-1851), were Scotch poets of varying 



CHAP. V THE MINOR POETS OF 1800-1830 717 

excellence ; the songs of Cunningham and of Motherwell put them 
a good deal above the others, though " Delta " has fervent admirers 
both in prose and verse. Two farmer poets, Robert Bloomfield 
( 1 766-1 823) and John Clare (i 793-1 864), rank as such in English 
literary history. Clare, like Christopher Smart, never acquired his 
full poetic power till madness seized him — as it had also seized 
Bloomfield, though with no such compensation. The Fanner's 
Boy of the latter is nothing but a not unpleasing versification of 
not uninteresting matter. Some pieces of Clare's (the best of 
which will be found in the second series of Mr. Palgrave's Golden 
Treasury^ are poems. Barry Cornwall (i 790-1 874), whose real 
name was Bryan Waller Procter, was the friend of many good 
men but not a very good poet ; no better, perhaps, than the much 
laughed at Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797- 1839). ^"^ ^^ critical 
ability which can distinguish between "The sea, the sea," and 
" Oh no, we never mention her " is difiScult to attain, and perhaps 
debilitating when acquired. Henry Cary (1772-1844), the translator 
of Dante; Reginald Heber (1783-1826), Bishop of Calcutta, and 
author of one of the very best of university prize poems and more 
than one of the best modern hymns; Sir Aubrey De Vere (1788- 
1846), a poet and the father of poets — are names which must not 
even here be entirely passed over ; but Ebenezer Elliott and Felicia 
Hemans must delay us a very little longer. 

Elliott ( 1 781-1849) was a Yorkshireman, and by no means an 
unprosperous one ; but he early espoused the extreme views of social, 
economical, and political matters which infected the working classes 
between Waterloo and the middle of the century. As Elliott, 
might be expected, he is not happy in the poems with a '^^^s. Hemans,^ 
purpose, some of which gained him the name of the 
'• Anti-Corn-Law Rhymer," though sometimes even here, especially 
in the " Battle Song," his native vigour gets the better of his acquired 
"ureason. He began to write before the end of the eighteenth 
century, and lived to see the triumph of Free Trade. Elliott's real 
strength, except in a very few things like the piece just named, where 
his poetry succeeds in absorbing and transforming his crotchet, is as a 
poet of nature, in which character he has done some things not much 
less than excellent. Mrs. Hemans (1793-1835) was named, before 
her apparently unhappy married life, Felicia Dorothea Browne, and 
was a native of Liverpool. She was scarcely past forty when she 
died, and had then written a great quantity of fluent and not 
unmelodious verse of a strongly sentimental kind. It is fair to 
.say that the latest m date is the best. She was a little outlived by 
her junior '' L. E. L." — Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), who 
to a pretty turn for verse added great personal charm and the 



7i8 THE TRIUMPH OF J^OMANCE book X 

mystery of an unhappy end, for she died, poisoned by mistake or 
otherwise, at Cape Coast Castle, where the husband whom she had just 
married was Governor. 

Thomas Hood was born in the heart of the city of London about 
1798-99, the son of a bookseller. His schooling was irregular, 
and his early employments varied, owing to his father's ill success 
in business, while his health was very weak. The con- 
temporary development of the press, however, was in 
time to provide him with his proper work, though not to give him 
the ample rewards for it which he would have received later. He 
became sub-editor of the London Alagazvic, and later edited others. 
But he was very unlucky in money matters, and the fault of others 
drove him to take refuge abroad, though he honourably met his 
creditors as soon and as fully as he could. Consumption carried him 
off in 1845, his ill-health and his ill-luck having been borne with an 
admirable gaiety which never degenerated into bravado. He was 
pensioned, but only just before his death. 

A good deal of Hood's work is mere hack labour — jokes pumped 
up for a livelihood — and of his longer attempts, though 6^ t/ie Rhine 
is charming, Tilney Hall is not worth much. His fame rests upon 
about two volumesful of verse divided in a sharp, and to some it 
would seem disturbing, manner between the serious and the comical. 
From the very first the merit of the serious division has been 
recognised by the best judges, though ignored to too great an extent 
by the public ; and it seems that the efforts of the former have at 
last some chance of success. Hood had real disadvantages of 
education, and still worse ones of circumstance ; but to balance them, 
if not entirely to overcome hem, he had two great gifts. One was 
that of genuine song-writing, whereby he produced too few but 
exquisite things, the poetry of the style in which Procter and Bayly 
were poetasters — "Fair Ines," "It was the time of Roses," "Fare- 
well life, my senses swim," and others. The other was of a meditative 
and slightly " eerie " strain, best - exemplified in The Flea of the 
Midsuinntcr Fairies and The Haufi{ ■' House, but manifested in 
many other pieces. This latter gift, if it-J by scholarship and fostered 
by leisure, might have done great things ; as it was it had hardly a 
chance. Nor ought it to be forgotten that Hood did do great things 
in a vein between pathos and humour, and that he succeeded in 
reaching popularity without forfeiting critical approval in the famous 
Song of the Shirt and Bridge of Sighs, both written so late in his career 
that he was evidently not in the least "written out." 

Winthrop Mackworth Praed was a much more fortunate man than 
Hood, with gifts similar in many ways, perhaps a litde thinner, but 
touched by fortune and art to even finer uses here and there. He 



CHAP. V THE MIN01 POETS OF 1 800-1 S30 719 

was born in 1802, the son of Serjeant Mackworth, who took the 
name of Praed, was sent to Eton and thence to Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, entered Parliament rather early and continued in 
it for the best part of a decade, till his death in 1839. 
He had already his foot on the lower steps of office, and was thought 
hkely, if not certain, to attain the higher had he lived. Praed's 
published work, like Hood's, contains a great deal of inferior matter, 
which he himself certainly would never have collected. The more 
valuable part consists of several verse-tales of an ironic-romantic 
character, very original and attractive, if not quite consummate ; of 
one or two serious pieces, such as " Arminius " and " My Pretty 
Josephine," from which possibilities may be augured ; of a splendid 
thing in the grim-grotesque style, "The Red Fisherman," better than 
any similar piece of Hood's ; and above all, of a handful of examples 
of the kind called " verse of society," which are far the most charm- 
ing of their kind in English, or rather are unique. These things, 
'•The Season," "The Letter of Advice," "The Vicar," "A Letter 
from Teignmouth," and others, have an indescribable grace and 
charm. 

The verse of Praed's college friend and rival Macaulay has been 
the occasion of curious dissent, not merely between critics and 
readers, but between one school of critics and another. It is not 
large in bulk, consisting of a few early pieces, and others 
written at different times, and of the well-known Lays of 
^;/«>«^ /{"i?;//^, published in 1842. At first, -^nd for years afterwards, 
these latter were favourably received both by critics and others. But 
it pleased Mr. Matthew Arnold, to whom ■ Macaulay was the embodi- 
ment of his enemy the Philistine, and vho did not like the ballad 
metre for ancient themes, to speak with the utmost contempt of them, 
and generation after generation of critics has echoed this contempt. 
Now, the poetry of Macaulay is not great: it is not the poetry 
of Tennyson or of Browning at its date ; it has neither exquisiteness 
of artistic suggestion nor volume and range of poetical thought. But 
it is poetry — poetry for thr.illion perhaps, except in a very few 
pieces, but not the less poetiy; and those who do not recognise the 
poetic quality in it show that their poetical thermometer is deficient in 
delicacy and range. 

Barnes and Hawker, two West-country clergymen, have had 
strong partisans, in each case not numerous, but respectable. The 
claims of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875), a man of somewhat 
eccentric character, who retired early to the remote cure 
of Morwenstow, on the Devonshire border of Cornwall, g^d BarnL. 
held it for nearly half a century, and in articulo mortis 
was received into the Roman- Church, are the safer of the two on 



720 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

general literary grounds. His longest and most ambitious poem, 
The Quest of the Sangreal, perhaps just misses complete success, and 
is distinguished by that stately but somewhat lifeless character which is 
noticeable in more than one or two poets of this group. He is most 
widely known by an early and very clever pastiche in ballad, "The 
Song of the Western Men," which was taken even by good judges as 
an original. His best things, however, are short, and partly local, 
partly ecclesiastical, in inspiration — '' Queen Gwennyvar's Round," 
"•The Bells of Bottreaux," "Morwenna Statio," and not a few others. 
Hawker had undoubtedly much and true poetry in him, but the hour 
had not come at his birth. 

Of William Barnes (i 800-1 886) one must speak more difiSdently, 
for on the one hand it is impossible to take poets on trust, and on 
the other unsafe to provoke his not very numerous but enthusiastic 
admirers. He wrote wholly in Dorset dialect, and chiefly on gentle, 
domestic, and pastoral themes, two features which attract many, 
revolt some, and perhaps count little one way or other with the critic. 
We must not rule a man out because he writes " smilen feace " for 
" smiling face " ; but in those who are jaded with '' smiling face " 
there is perhaps a dangerous readiness to take "smilen feace" as 
necessarily poetry. 

The foiled and marred genius of Hartley Coleridge (i 796-1 849) 

tried verse as well as prose, and has left its best memorials in the 

sonnet. Few better things have been written than the sonnet to 

Shakespeare, "The soul of man is larger than the sky" 

Coleridge (which preceded, and perhaps inspired, the better known 

one of Matthew Arnold), and that on his own wasted 

life — " When I survey the course that I have run " — where the peculiar 

clangorous rise of strain (which is found in Shakespeare's own and 

the other best Elizabethan examples, and which seems to belong 

specially to the Shakespearian as opposed to the Petrarchian form) 

is very noticeable. 

Sir Henry Taylor was a very popular poet with thoughtful lovers 
of poetry in the second quarter of the century, and Philip Van Arte- 
velde (published in 1834) at least keeps a high place by virtue of 
„. traditional esteem, if not exactly of familiar acquaintance. 

Its author was born, like Macaulay, in 1800, but lived 
till 1888, being for the greater part of his life a Government servant. 
He began, with Isaac Cot/inenus, before Tennyson had published any- 
thing except Poems by Two Brothers, and continued with other things 
till the St. ClevieiiVs Eve of 1862; but by that time his fashion of 
poetry was hesterna rosa. Taylor's blank verse, besides serving 
frequently as the vehicle of an excellent seriousness, is dignified in 
itself and sufficiently varied for his purpose, but it was not very well 



CHAP.v THE MINOR POETS OF 1800-1S30 721 

suited for any kind of poetry except the dramatic ^ and didactic. 
His lyric work, not abundant nor very varied, is good. 

Taylor, tliough hardly a dramatist, was mainly a dramatic poet, 
and the dramatic bent is curiously illustrated in most of the poets of 
this transition, especially in Richard Hengist Home, George Darley, 
and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Home, who was born 
three years later than Sir Henry Taylor, and died two 
years earlier, was a copious and miscellaneous writer, and his most 
famous and best thing, Orion, a poem of most stately versification, 
and very original in thought, but deficient in action, is an epic — a 
'' farthing epic," for its eccentric author published it at that price — 
not a tragedy. But Cosmo de Medici and the Death of Marlowe take 
the dramatic form, though, like almost all the plays of this period, 
they are literature without acting qualities. 

George Darley, born in the same year with Keats, was Irish, and 
of Dublin University, wrote on the London, and in later life was 
chiefly a critic. He was a good song-writer, in the same class with 
Hood, and his •■' I've been roaming" was once exceed- 
ingly popular ; but his principal work is to be found in "^ ^' 
Sylvia (1827), and Nepenthe (1839). The former of these is a fairy 
play, unequal, full of superfluities and inequalities, and marred by 
awkwardly handled comic passages, but very charming in parts. 
It is spun of delightful lyrics, of octosyllabic couplets no less delight- 
ful, of other kinds of verse less uniformly charming, and of prose 
written too much in falsetto. It has, after many years, found a 
reprinter ^ and modern imitators, who, however, have not equalled 

iThe strange divorce between literature and drama which has marked the 
nineteenth century seems to make it useless to devote separate notice to this 
branch. The dramatic work of tlie greater men is best noticed with their poems. 
A characteristic example of the lesser is Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854, 
a judge, a friend of Lamb, and author of agreeable Memorials of him), whose 
half-famous Ion (1835) possesses a sort of icy beauty, or at least handsome- 
ness. The chief dramatists of George IV.'s and William IV.'s reigns were James 
Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862) and the first Lord Lytton. Knowles had a good 
practical knowledge of the stage, and Bulwer was wise enough to accept advice 
from those who possessed it, so that in acting qualities the plays of both excel 
those of most English play-writers of any literary pretensions since Sheridan. But 
Knowles, whose best-remembered things are The Hunchback and The Love Chase, 
had no literary genius, and not a very strong literary talent, so that his works, 
useful on the boards, are lumber on the shelves. Nor does the undoubted talent, 
the at least not peremptorily to be denied genius of Bulwer, show at its best in 
his plays, The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, Money, while the theatre naturally provoked 
an exhibition of his worst faults, fioridness of expression and sentimentality. 

'^ London, 1892. Nepenthe has also been republished, but not uniformly 
(London, 1897), and a privately printed edition of Poems was arranged in 1890 
by Canon Livingstone. The Labours of Idleness and the plays must be read in 
the originals. 

3A 



722 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book X 

the curious attraction of its tangled brake of poetry. Nepenthe, a 
much shorter piece and not dramatic, is in two cantos, the first deal- 
ing with Joy, the second with Melancholy, and was intended to be 
completed by a third on Contentment. It is partly in octosyllables, 
partly in lyric measures, and though far more abstract and incoherent 
than Sylvia, has the same lovely snatches of poetry, contrasted with 
much bombast and stutter. The apostrophe, ''Oh blest unfabled 
incense-tree ! " and some other things are worthy of anybody. 
Earlier, Darley had published in 1822 a poem called The Errors of 
Ecstasie, and a very curious prose-and-verse medley, The Labours 
of Idleness, by "Guy Penseval" (1826), which contains in its last 
piece the germ of Sylvia. Later, he published two plays, Thomas a 
Becket (1840) and Ethelstan (1841), which have all his faults and 
hardly any of his merits. He is, on the whole, strangely premoni- 
tory of many of the poets of the century, both the " Spasmodics " of 
its middle period and others much later ; but few of those who 
belong to his class have equalled his best things. 

The same attraction, but in higher degree and rarer kind, is to 

be found in Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who was born at Clifton in 

1803, and died by his own hand in 1849 at Basle. Beddoes, who 

„ ,, was the son of a doctor of great repute, and of Maria 

Beddoes. . o i ' 

Edgeworth's sister Anna, went to Charterhouse and Pem- 
broke College, Oxford, but spent nearly the whole of his manhood 
on the Continent, where he had gone to study medicine. He was 
undoubtedly mad in the later part of his life, and perhaps not entirely 
sane at any part of it ; nor did his mental disturbance take, as has 
often been the case with men of letters, an agreeable form. But 
among the small and interesting group of English poets whose great 
wits have suffered more than an alliance with madness, he is one of 
the most remarkable. Before going abroad he had published two very 
small volumes of verse, The Iniprovisatore and TJie Bride''s Tragedy, 
and he had shown a great interest in poetry, clubbing with Procter 
and others to publish (or guarantee the expenses of publishing) 
Shelley's posthumous work. But the best of his own verse was post- 
humous (185 1 ), and it has been reinforced since with some fragments 
and with Letters.' His chief performance, kept in hand for years 
and never fully completed, is a drama called Death''s Jest Book, or 
The FooVs Tragedy, in which he takes the wildest examples of the 
Elizabethan jjeriod, the plays of Tourneur, for model in more than the 
title. Composition Beddoes has none : his larger works are mere 
dreams, and mostly bad dreams, with but the thinnest thread of even 
romantic and subjective coherence, with a total disregard of prob- 

^Poems (2 vols. London, 1890), Letters (i vol. London, 1894), both edited by 
Mr. Gosse. 



CHAP. V THE MINOR POETS OF 1800-1830 723 

ability in incident, and with the characters looming half-finished 
through darkness and blood-tinged mist. But they contain passages, 
especially lyrical passages, of the most exquisite poetical beauty, and 
these lyrics are joined by others independently composed. " Dream- 
Pedlary," " The Dirge for Wolfram," the " Song from Torrismond," 
the " Song on the Water," " Love in Idleness," and not one or two 
but many others, are among the most consummate things in English. 
The only charge, valid as a charge, brought against them is that 
they are not original, and this is false as a fact. Beddoes did not 
copy the Elizabethan dramatists, he continued them in their own 
spirit ; and it may be questioned whether, though we have since had 
far greater poets than he is, we have ever had greater poetry than his. 



INTERCHAPTER X 

Those who have followed the narrative to this point will have small 
difficulty in anticipating the summary of the Book just concluded. 
Yet it is of the first importance to appreciate exactly what happened 
at the beginning of the period which it covers, for this is the last 
definite turn — the last of the innumerable revolutions and eddies which 
constitute the history of English literature. Only minor changes 
have taken place since. Between Johnson, who died in 1784, and 
Coleridge, who was then ten years old, there are differences of species, 
almost of genus ; between Coleridge and Mr. Swinburne, who was 
not born when Coleridge died, there are only the differences of the 
individual, and those of a certain accumulated experience and experi- 
ment in the same paths. From time to time bright spirits, intolerant 
of the traditional, try to alter the bournes of time and space in these 
respects, and to make out that the Classical, whatever the failings 
on its part, was always in its heart rather Romantic, and that the 
Romantic has always, at its best, been just a little Classical. There 
is, of course, a certain amount of truth in this : everything in the 
universe has its share (sometimes rather a small one) of universal 
quality, or it could not exist. But such observations are only of use 
as guards against a too wooden and matter-of-fact classification ; 
the great general differences of the periods remain, and can never be 
removed in imagination without loss and confusion. 

What then is this difference between " Classical " and '• Romantic" ? 
What was it that for the time succumbed, and what was it that for the 
time prevailed, in the battle, of which the first artillery salvo was the 
Lyrical Ballads? The question is one still unsettled, one never likely 
to be settled completely. Yet, amid endless individual differences, 
there is perhaps much more general agreement than might be sup- 
posed. In the wide sense the debate between Classical and Romantic 
concerns the opposite sides taken on certain theses, of which the more 
important are — that poetry depends upon the subject; that every 
kind of poetry has a prescribed or prescribable form, outside which 
even beauties, as La Harpe said of the beauties of Dante and Milton, 

724 



INTERCHAPTER X 725 



are " monstrous '' ; that convention, generalisation, abstention as 
much as possible from the fantastic, the individual, the abnormal are 
the best principles of literature ; that definiteness, proportion, exact 
solution of the problem proposed, are preferable to the suggestive, 
the vague, the incomplete, or the irregularly beautiful. 

And the English eighteenth century, with the later part of the 
seventeenth, had, besides taking very definite position on the Classical 
side in regard to these questions, added certain purely arbitrary and 
more or less accidental restrictions of its own. It had decided that, 
while human nature was to be attended to, in at least a good many of 
its aspects, with the most sedulous care, external nature was to be a 
little neglected. It had by practice always, and sometimes by 
precept, made curious and still more arbitrary limitations in such 
admittedly unessential points as metre, style, literary forms and 
kinds. It had, again without any necessary or logical connection, 
decided that very nearly all non-dramatic English literature before 
the middle of the seventeenth century might be neglected, and that 
the dramatic authors of this neglected time were a set of inspired 
but too often ill-behaved babies. Without formally pronouncing any 
decree on the subject, it had shut its eyes to almost all foreign modern 
literature except French and a little Italian, and had studied the very 
classics themselves with a curious eclecticism, postponing Greek to 
Latin, and arranging Latin authors themselves according to its own 
good pleasure. 

The operation of the causes detailed piecemeal in Book IX., 
beginning, as usual, almost as early as the Convention itself, gradually 
broke it up; and though it would be extremely difficult to prove that 
even one of the great writers of 1 798-1 830 deliberately planned the 
change all round — though Wordsworth, who certainly did plan a 
change, went wrong in some important particulars of revolt, and even 
retained some of the most dubious points of the old creed — yet the 
results (which, rather than the efforts, are the things to look at) 
followed the lines indicated above. The immense performance of 
these thirty years in poetry was only in the smallest degree deliberate, 
and when it was deliberate, as in the case of Wordsworth's "silly 
sooth," it was very often at its worst. The new wine shaped the 
bottles, when it did not burst them, by its own fermentation. Except 
in some metrical points — the chief of which were the Christabel 
experiment and the gradual, though by no means universal, disuse of 
the sharply divided couplet — very little of the poetic change began 
at the formal end. The accumulation of new subjects — Mediaeval, 
Eastern, and what not ; the crowd of new models — German, Old 
English, Celtic, true or spurious, and what not again ; above all, the 
diversity of new talents, broke ground in every possible way in verse. 



726 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x 

As far as " orders of the day " went, the only order of importance, 
taken for granted if not formally pronounced, was that you might 
write as you liked ; that it was not necessary to imitate anybody in 
creation ; that in criticism what pleased yourself, and not what 
Aristotle, Horace, Pope, Johnson had laid down, was to be the rule. 
In so far as any one saying of any one person is the motto of 1798- 
1830, it is the saying of Blake, poet and painter, that in painting, 
and no doubt in poetry too, "every man is a connoisseur who has 
not been connoisseured out of his senses." 

In point of genius the period is a period of poetry; in point of 
mere form the remarkable change in it concerns not poetry but prose. 
It is possible that since the death of Milton there had never been 
alive in England a poet of the absolutely first rank ; but there had 
been many writers who might in prose have attained such rank if it 
had not been for the traditions of prose-writing. Prose even more 
than verse had expiated the short excesses of 1 580-1660 by a period, 
nearly twice as long, of sober correctness, and it was now to have its 
fling, its series of flings, for nearly a hundred years from Landor and 
Wilson to Stevenson and Pater. 

But the rush of new or altered kinds is almost as noticeable as 
the plethora of genius and the changes of literary etiquette. In 
poetry the land, from possessing a few sober rills, becomes a land of 
springs and waters ; the novel, late found, develops enormously ; the 
essay almost outstrips it in development ; history fills whatever gap 
may be caused by the dwindling of philosophy and theology as 
contributors to literature ; fresh varieties arise every decade, almost 
every year. Undoubtedly there is something of Babel in all this ; 
the time, at any rate to living eyes, admits of no clear description; its 
characteristics, if they exist distinctly, have not yet emerged like those 
of earlier ages. But we know that it was an age of very great 
literature, and that it was not destined to be ill succeeded. 



BOOK XI 



VICTORIAN LITERATURE 
CHAPTER I 

TENNYSON AND BROWNING 

Tennyson: his early work and its character — The volumes of 1842 — His later 
life and works — The Princess — In Memoriam — Maud — The Idylls of the 
King, etc. — Robert Browning — Periods of his work — His favourite method — 
His real poetical appeal — Edward FitzGerald — Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

There is no contrast of contemporaries in English Literature, not 
even the half-imaginary one between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, 
so curious as that which for sorne two-thirds of the nineteenth 
century is provided by the poetry of Alfred Tennyson and that of 
Robert Browning. As in the former case, the men were friends ; as in 
that, their methods were at once curiously unlike and curiously com- 
plementary. 

Tennyson, the third son of a large family, the father of which, Dr. 
George Tennyson, was, though disinherited, the real head of an old 
house, was born at his father's living of Somersby on the Lincolnshire 
Wolds in 1809. His elder brothers, Frederick and Chai'les,^ t, , . 

^ . , ■ lennyson: his 

were also poetically given, and all three collaborated early work and 
in the so-called Poems by Two Brothers which appeared "^ character, 
in 1826. Alfred was educated at the Grammar School of Louth, and 
then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained the 

1 Frederick, the eldest, who was born in 1807 and lived till 1B98, published 
a volume of verse much above the average, Days and Hours, in 1854, and two 
or three more in the last decade of his long life. Charles, who was born in 1808, 
took the name of Turner, and died in 1879, was all but a very great master of 
th' sonnet, and a large collection of his work in this kind appeared posthumously 
in 1880. 

727 



728 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

Chancellor's Prize for a poem which was altered in subject from the 
Battle of Armageddon to Timbuctoo. In 1830 he published a 
volume of Poems, of which all that he chose to save appear, with 
others, in the later editions as Juvenilia. These pieces, which were 
rigorously revised later, may perhaps include — with the capital 
exceptions of the "Ode to Memory," where the intensely accurate 
and yet thoroughly translated observation of the poet appears ; " The 
Dying Swan," which is a good early example of his command of 
concerted metre ; and " Mariana in the Moated Grange," which com- 
bines both — none of his best and most characteristic work, unless 
the '• Recollections of the Arabian Nights " be also allowed a place. 
But " Claribel," the opening piece, is characteristic and original, 
if not best, and the other ideal girl-pieces ('' Oriana " stands apart, 
and is better than any), the " Sea-Fairies," and still others, also 
appeal from this judgment. Astonishing power of visual presentation, 
and a still more astonishing skill of musical accompaniment, marked 
the poet already. But his touch was extremely uncertain ; he would 
constantly mar it with the mawkishness and gush which Keats had 
learnt from Leigh Hunt and handed on ; the jewelled and polished 
perfection of his work as we now know it simply did not exist. At 
the end of 1832, but with the date of 1833, he issued another volume, 
where the same defects of detail were relieved by a far greater height 
of aim and range of delivery. This contained, and indeed took title 
from, the " The Lady of Shalott," not yet in its full perfection of 
tapestried scene and ringing, waving rhyme, but still beautiful already ; 
the wonderful " Lotus-Eaters " ; the great pair of picture-galleries, the 
Palace of Art and the Dream of Fair \l 'oi/ie7i ; the splendid, force- 
ful, new blank verse of "CEnone"; "Mariana in the South" (the 
poet had made a flying visit to the Pyrenees the summer before), a 
wonderful pendant to the Northern ; the fiery " Fatima," one of 
his few excursions in the line of direct passion, but a great one ; the 
" Two Voices," a piece usually rated far too low ; and the inferior and 
popular, but pretty, " Miller's Daughter" and "May Queen." 

But in this the faults of execution still remained ; and both 
volumes were savagely, but not quite unfairly, criticised for faults 
which in most cases were removed by the poet in consequence of 
these very criticisms. They acted, indeed, not as a killing frost, only 
as a frosty but kindly nip to a too precocious and exuberant growth, 
keeping Llie plant back and causing infinite improvement in flower 
and fruit later. For all but ten years Tennyson wrote a good deal, 

altered freely, but published nothing, and it was not till 
'^^'of^iSj""'*^^ 1842 that he reappeared with two small volumes, one 

containing a selection of the earlier pieces thoroughly 
revised and enormously improved, the other a collection of new 



TENNYSON AND BROWNING 729 



"English Idylls and Other Poems." It is customary to fix on some 
of these latter as his first perfect work, and it has not been 
uncommon for judges of importance to put them above anything 
that he produced later. But nothing in the Tennysonian kind can 
surpass " Mariana," or the " Lotos-Eaters," or the " Dream of Fair 
Women." Still, it is not wonderful that such things as "Ulysses" 
and the first '^ Morte d'Arthur " confirmed old admirers and obtained 
hosts of new ones for the poet. The "English Idylls" of the title, 
" The Gardener's Daughter," " Dora," " Walking to the Mail," and 
others were exceedingly popular, though they cannot be called very 
great poetry, exquisite as are some of the pictures in the first named ; 
and "The Day-Dream," and "Will Waterproofs Monologue" (the 
latter the poet's best light thing) also fall short of the grand style. 
But this is perfectly attained in " Ulysses," in the " Morte d'Arthur," 
in " Love and Duty," in " Locksley Hall," in the batch of other 
pieces, perhaps to be called Ballads for want of any better name — 
" St. Agnes' Eve," " Sir Galahad," " Sir Lancelot and Queen Guin- 
evere " — in " The Vision of Sin," and the still more exquisite batch 
of songs and fragments, " Break, break," " Come not, when I am 
dead," "The Poet's Song," and others. In these, ears not origi- 
nally deaf to poetry, and not obstructed by any special prejudice, 
could not fail to detect the notes of a poetry newer, more individual, 
and richer than had been heard, except in the great writers of the 
generation immediately preceding, for the best part of two centuries. 
The main notes of this poetry, once more, were, first, the felicity of 
presentation of the visual picture, whether in the sharp, succinct 
fashion of the compartments of the " Palace " and the " Dream," or 
in larger groups or smaller touches ; secondly, the new modulation 
of vowel, syllable, word, line, and stanza, so as to produce a running 
musical accompaniment at once to the image and to the idea. 
Subsidiary to the first gift was the also mentioned faculty of obser- 
vation of small details of nature ; to the second, a rich, but not 
promiscuous, store of words both simple and compound, and a 
metrical gift which showed itself in many measures, but specially in 
a new and magnificent kind of blank verse, ranking below, if below, 
Milton's, only because it owes a certain amount of debt thereto. 
These gifts and others had not yet been set to the composition of 
any long poem, but had produced numerous and singularly varied 
handlings, in the special taste of the century, of things past and 
piesent, scenes, characters (though cliaracter was not Tennyson's 
forte), emotions, incidents, thoughts — each placed for itself and for 
ever in an eternising frame and setting of poetry. 

Tennyson lived for exactly half a century after the publication 
of the volumes of 1842, and increased immensely the bulk, the variety, 



730 . VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

the scale of his productions ; but, as generally, though not always, 
happens with poets of the first rank, he produced little that was new in 
kind, and perhaps nothing that was at once new in kind 
^nd works'!*' and of the very first value. For this last estimate can 
certainly not be allowed either to his dramas or to his 
poems in Lincolnshire dialect, though the latter were very effective, 
and the former have received praise, higher than that generally 
accorded to them, from some good judges. But the success, not 
striking or popular, but certain, of the 1842 issue was in many ways 
a turning-point in his career. By degrees the sale of his verse gave 
him first a small, then a moderate, and latterly an ever-increasing 
income. Before this happened, and when his private means, which 
had always been very narrow, were threatened by an injudicious 
investment, he received a Crown pension which placed him above 
want. Neither at this time, nor at any other, did he ever desert 
poetry for lucrative avocations of any kind, even literary. He slowly 
elaborated the important collection of Elegies which was to appear 
as /;/ Me//io}iain, and he completed, and in 1847 published, the 
"medley" of The Princess — his first long poem, his 
'""^ '^ ■ longest, if we except the congeries of the Idylls — the 
consummate expression of his mastery in blank verse, and, at least 
in its second and slightly altered form, with inserted songs, one of the 
most charming, if not one of the greatest, poems in English. The 
exceedingly difficult kind of the playfully romantic, if not mock- 
heroic, in which it is written, is not universally relished ; it is too 
serious for some, not serious enough for others, and prejudices of 
various sorts have interfered with its reception. But it is as much at 
the head of its own division of poetry on the Romantic side as The 
Rape of the Lock is on the Classical, and it has appeals which are 
unknown to Pope's glittering little masterpiece. 

Three years later, in 1850. Tennyson not only married, and was 

appointed Poet-Laureate in .succession to Wordsworth, but published 

Iji Memoriam. This volume — composed of a large number of short 

/« Mejno- pieces in the four-lined octosyllabic stanza rhymed abba, 

riani. -which had been sparingly employed by seventeenth- 
century poets, but out of which they had only by accident, and once 
or twice, got the full metrical value — has been often put forward as 
Tennyson's greatest work, and has been hotly attacked and defended 
as not merely a rite of friendship, but a theological eirenicon between 
faith and scepticism. The first judgment is one of will-worship, 
and the second practice is merely an instance of the apparently 
ineradicable habit of shrinking from the judgment of poetry as poetry, 
and endeavouring to drag it into another court. As poetry /« 
Meinoriain contains things which are equal to Tennyson's best ; but 



CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 731 

it is necessarily less varied in subject, more sombre in hue and im- 
agery, and pervaded by an atmosphere which, when it ceases to be 
impressive — if it should happen to do so with this or that mood or 
character — becomes slightly oppressive. Its highest praise is that 
it applies and expresses in a new field those gifts of the poet which 
have been already described, and shows that, like all true poetic gifts, 
they are capable of universal application. 

His next two works, the Ode on the Death of the Duke of 
Wellington (1852) and Maud (1855) were rather violently attacked, 
as generally happens when a man has lately risen to any eminence. 
There is no nobler passage in the poetry of patriotism 
than part of the first. The second showed, and fortu- 
nately for almost the last time, that uncertainty and inequality of taste 
and touch, at the first time of asking, which had always distinguished 
the poet. Developing out of some earlier verses, "O that 'twere 
possible," which are still its central and most exquisite passage, it 
aimed at too much political and social satire in the style of Carlyle's 
contemporary Latter-day Pamphlets, denunciation of " peace at any 
price," commercialism, and the like, neglecting for these its legitimate 
theme of ''love that never met its earthly close," despair, madness, 
and reconciliation. It was improved later, and contains some of 
the most passionate and echoing things that the poet ever did, but 
it is as far below The Princess in homogeneity and adjustment to its 
aim as it is above it in these parts. 

The detraction died, and the next volume, the Idylls of the King 
(1859), estated Tennyson securely for the rest of his life as not merely 
the official but the unquestioned head of English poetry. It was 
devoted to the Arthurian Legend, which it treated, not 
consecutively, but in four episodes — the Welsh story of IheKing^^^C 
Geraint of Devon and his patient wife Enid, the less 
poetical version of Merlin's enchantment, a variant of that adventure 
of Lancelot which he had earlier touched in " The Lady of Shalott," 
and (greatest of ail) the parting of Arthur and Guinevere. In later 
issues fresh episodes were added, and the whole was in a manner 
framed by a new "Coming of Arthur," and by the original and 
splendid "Morte" eked with less precious matter in a "Passing" 
to match. Next came Enoch Arden (1864), containing among 
larger but lesser things the lovely "Voyage," " Tithonus," "In. the 
Valley of Cauteretz," and others, as well as the first of the dialect 
pieces alluded to. And in the nearly thirty years which remained to 
him Tennyson rounded off the Idylls to an Arthuriad in twelve books, 
began in 1875 ^.nd continued a series of chiefly historical plays ^ 

'^ Queen Mary, 1875; Harold, x^j-j; The Promise of May, 1882; Becket, 1884; 
The Cup aud the Falcon, 1884; The Foresters, 1892. 



732 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

of more dubious value, and at intervals issued by themselves, 
or with instalments of the Idylls, volumes of miscellaneous verse,^ 
the last of which, the Death of CEnone, was not published till after 
his own death on 6th October 1892. No one of these failed to 
contain things worthy of his best days, and that of 1880, called 
Ballads and Other Foe/ns, was especially rich in them, while the last 
issued in his lifetime, Deineter, closed with the marvellous swan-song 
of "Crossing the Bar." 

He had added to English poetry a body of work which, though 
not the greatest contributed by any man, though falling short of 
Chaucer and Coleridge in fresh and original gift, of Spenser in 
uniform excellence and grasp of a huge subject, of Shakespeare in 
universality, in height and depth and every other creature, of Milton 
in grandeur and lonely sublimity, of Wordsworth in ethical weight 
and grip of nature behind the veil, of Shelley in unearthliness, and 
of Keats in independence and voluptuous spontaneity, yet deserves 
to be ranked with the best of these, except Shakespeare only, in 
virtue of its astonishing display of poetic art. Tennyson had never, 
no matter what his detractors may say, come short in poetic 
thought ; in poetic style he had shown a uniform mastery not 
elsewhere to be equalled, and a quality hardly elsewhere to be sur- 
passed. He had carried the special poetic mission of the nineteenth 
century in English — that of applying the powers of colour, form, and 
music to the investment of the largest possible number of themes with 
the imaginative suggestion of poetry — to a point not reached by any 
other, and in all his long and fertile career had never finally failed 
in a single application of them, putting the dramatic attempts, in 
which he was merely a stranger, aside. He had justified that 
"return to nature" — of which the danger was that it should become 
as conventional, as cut and dried, as the generalising away from 
nature which had preceded it — to a pitch, not merely by an infinity of 
fresh and felt observations, but by invariably touching these observa- 
tions with the necessary point of generalisation itself. He is always 
real, but never realist ; never conventional, but also never photo- 
graphic. His music is more difficult to praise, because the ear is a 
more arbitrary sense than the eye. To those who have ears to hear 
there is absolutely no poet so inexhaustible and original in harmony 
as Tennyson. The story told in his Life of a hearer who knew no 
English, but knew Tennyson to be a poet by the hearing, is probable 
and valuable, or rather invaluable, for it points to the best, if not the 
only true, criterion of poetry. 

1 The Holy Grail, 1870 ; Garefh and Lynette, \iT2. ; Ballads, 1880 ; 
Tiresias, 1885; Locksky Hall Sixty Years After, 1887; Demeter, 1889, were 
the chi(.f of these. 



CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 733 

The life of Robert Browning was as wholly devoted to literature 
as that of Tennyson, but he was rather more attracted by society ; 
much of it was spent abroad, whereas Tennyson never 
left England save for trips ; and it lacked the usual Browning 
introductory experiences of an Englishman. Browning 
was born in May 1812, in the southern suburbs of London, went to no 
regular school, nor to Oxford or Cambridge ; and though his reading 
was wide and appreciative, it lacked throughout his life the touch of 
scholarship in the wide and liberal sense which distinguished Tennyson. 
Nor was this circumstance by any means unimportant in condition- 
ing the peculiarities of his poetical style. His first poem was 
Pauline, written in his nineteenth and published in his twenty-first 
year; his next, Paracelsus, appeared in 1835. Pauline, though not 
consummate, is characteristic ; neither the verse, nor the style proper, 
nor the substance, could be affiliated on anybody, except perhaps 
Shelley, and on Shelley to a limited extent only. Certain passages 
have a regular beauty not common later with the author, and 
assuredly not to be found in any contemporary work except that of 
Tennyson ; but the chief interest of the piece is its early revelation 
of the breathless, intense, " monodramatic" manner, eschewing 
incident but delighting in analysis, which was to be one of the poet's 
points throughout and ultimately to prevail over all the others. 
Paracelsus has far more direct charm. Here the form is openly 
dramatic, at least the personages speak personally. The blank verse 
is still more breathless and peculiar ; there are lyrics showing some 
beauty and promising much, and the characters are projected in an 
entirely novel fashion. 

From this time the poet's vocation may. be considered as fixed ; 
and though his public was at first smaller even than Tennyson's, and 
took far longer to increase, he always had his devotees, and never 
allowed detraction or neglect to check him. The play — 
a play in a manner actable and acted — of Strafford came his work, 
in 1837; then the poem of Sordello (less distinguished 
now among its author's work, perhaps, since his last thirty years of 
vogue, than it was as an " awful example " or a cherished idol during 
the previous thirty of contempt) and the collection called Bells and 
Pomegranates, which appeared between 1841 and 1846. After the 
publication of the pieces contained in this last, it was no longer 
permissible for any catholic judge of poetry to dismiss Browning's 
claim to the position of a poet, true certainly, and probably great. 
The plays, after his own strange mode, which were included, might 
still have left a doubt, and sometimes more than a doubt. But the 
pieces called Dramatic Lyrics, especially "In a Gondola" and 
" Porphyria's Lover," .should have settled the question. The public 



734 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

reception was, however, still cold or totally wanting. He married 
the poetess Elizabeth Barrett at this time. 1850, the year of In 
Memoriam, saw the great monodramatic piece of Christmas Eve and 
Easter Day, and 1855, the year of Maud, the still greater Men and 
lVo>/ien. In these three books Browning had taken his place once 
for all ; and the poet of " The Last Ride Together " and " Love among 
the Ruins " could speak in the gate with any one, enemy or friend. 
He still wrote rather sparingly, and his next publication w'as prob- 
ably checked by liis wife's death in 1861, after which he returned 
to England. In 1864, however, came Dramatis Persona:, the last 
of his middle period, and the last volume containing his very greatest 
work. "James Lee," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and "Prospice" are 
among the greatest poems of the century. This volume, and a 
collected edition of the previous work which had ushered it, produced 
a great effect on the generation which had been growing up for 
Browning ; and it was probably with some confidence, though with 
a defiant acknowledgment of his earlier, if not still existing, un- 
popularity, that he attempted to convert the public with one of the 
most audacious of advances, The Ring and the Book, a mighty 
collection of pieces in some twenty thousand lines, telling the same 
story over and over again so as to exhibit different personalities in 
a dozen different ways. The public ''came to heel," and for the 
twenty years more during which his life lasted Browning, though 
still anathematised by a very few, was grudgingly tolerated by more, 
admitted by the general, and wildly and foolishly adored by a certain 
sect. He could not throw off things too rapid, too apparently 
crabbed, too really flimsy and ill-digested, for them ; and though he 
seldom during this time put out a book without something good in 
it, he did nearly as much to damage his fame as he had previously 
done to build it up. Fortunately, his lyric gift remained, showing 
itself at times charmingly, and in his last volume, Asolando (published 
at the very moment of his death in 1889), with sufficient volume and 
variety to end by reconciling those who had been for a time estranged 
by the verbiage, the pretentiousness, the real vacuity, of things like 
Red Cotton Nightcap Country (1873) and The Inn Album (1875); 
not much charmed by the inequality and tapage of Balaustion''s 
Adventure (its companion of the year 1871, Prince Hohenstiel- 
Schwangau, is better), Aristophanes'' Apology (1875), La Saisiaz 
(1878), Dramatic Idylls (1879-80), Ferishtah's Fancies (1884), and 
Parley ings with Certain People of Importance (1887) ; and alternately 
reconciled and redisgusted by Fifine at the Fair (1872), Pacchiarotto 
(1876), 2i\\diJocoseria (1883). 

Despite, however, this unfortunate inequality, or rather this unfort- 
unate yielding to temptation, even Browning's aberrations from the 



CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 735 

true poetic provide at least passages which are poetry. Their jDlan 
is, with an appearance of diversity, very much the same from 
Fajiliue to the Parleyings . The poet takes a character, 
an anecdote, sometimes little more than a name ; and method"'^ 
instead of focussing it from the outside, or making it 
speak in simple dramatic fashion, with such passages of ornament 
as he can give, he shakes it about, dissecting, or trying to dissect, its 
"soul," analysing its constituents, folding and unfolding it to get 
dift'erent lights and aspects, but never exactly summing up or giving 
us the whole. In this process — using as he does for the most part 
blank verse of great variety and vigour, but breathless, somewhat 
prosaic in rhythm and cadence, or else rhymed arrangements fluid 
enough, but with their fluency much chequered by verbal tricks, and 
rhyming in the most audacious, though rarely in any positively 
incorrect, fashion — he produces effects which perhaps seem even more 
formless than they are, but which certainly dispense with the exacter 
graces of form to an extent very unwise, and perhaps distinctly ille- 
gitimate for the poet. A green or a jaded taste may sometimes relish 
his phrase and period ; but the finer palate at once declines the labour 
that is required, and fails to rank very high the pleasure that results. 

But in his shorter, and especially in his lyrical, pieces, where the 
imperative melody of stanza and rhyme not merely sweetens his 
acerbity and makes his jejuneness succulent, but applies a positive 
check to his verbiage, his prolixity, his headlong readi- y{\=, real 
ness to accept the first word that comes, Browning is poetical 
usually a poet, very often a great poet, not seldom a ^^^'^' 
poet almost or quite of the greatest. Some surprise was expressed 
when a critic, soon followed by others, designated him at his death 
"the poet of love," for his later worshippers had been wont to extol 
his "thought" and philosophy, not his passion. But the conversion 
of at least some of the fittest was soon effected. It is always on this 
subject, and on a certain optimist view of the triumph of life, that 
Browning is happiest, while in connection with both he has the 
faculty of the century for giving what Dr. Johnson scornfully called 
"the streaks in the tulip." "The Last Ride Together," innumerable 
as are the great love-poems in English from "Alison" to "Rose 
Mar}'," admits no superior and very few equals. " Rabbi ben Ezra," 
the praise of age, of failure, of approaching death, the triumphant 
assertion of — 

All I could never be, all men mistook in me, 

is practically unique, though no doubt it owed a certain suggestion 
and start, such as is common with poets, to passages of FitzGerald's 
Omar Khayyam (see below). Of Browning we may say, Timor 



736 VICTORIAN LITERATURE 



mortis noii contiirbabat. In a hundred other pieces hardly inferior, 
in the browner shades of age as well as in the spring of youth, he 
sang, not like most poets. Love and Death, but Love and Life. 

That he was a great, a consummate master of poetic music, 
as well as of poetic thought and vision, meets more gainsayers. It 
is certain that he was dangerously prone to indulgence in discords, 
and that for long stretches of his verse, especially in his later lucubra- 
tions, he seems to be indifferent to any music at all except that of the 
horse-fiddle, or at best the hurdy-gurdy. But in the class of lyrics 
just referred to — and even in others — there is no softness that he 
cannot insinuate, no crash or clangour that he cannot reach. That 
he too often contemns the demand of his passenger to be " carried 
softly along in the melodious coach " is true likewise. But when he 
cared to use it he had a chariot of that kind which yielded in pure 
voluptuous caressing movement to none, and which is perhaps all 
the more enjoyed when the passenger is shot into it from the jolting 
tumbrels of his more ordinary rolling-stock. 

The almost unprecedented fashion in which these two poets at 
once lead and sum up the poetic production of two-thirds of a century 
has made it necessary to treat them at greater length than is usual 
in these later Books. We must now be briefer, yet not 
FitzGeraid. ^°° brief, wjth the most remarkable of their more imme- 
diate contemporaries, the wife of the one and a very early 
and intimate friend of the other, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and 
Edward FitzGeraid. FitzGeraid was born in 1809, at Woodbridge 
in Suffolk, a district which was his residence by choice as well as 
cliance during almost the whole of his life. He was the younger son 
of a man of property, and spent great part of his childhood in 
France, but was sent to the Grammar School of Bury St. Edmunds, 
entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1826, and during his days 
there knew Tennyson only by sight, though he was intimate with 
Thackeray. Of independent though small means, and intolerant of 
general society and business, he entered no profession, and gradually 
settled down on the banks of the Deben, smoking, reading, dreaming, 
and at times using the sea a good deal, until his death on 14th June 
1883. He had married, rather late in life, the daughter of Lamb's 
friend, Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet. 

FitzGerald's literary interests, though a little crotchety, were 
intense, and he was at different times an intimate friend of the three 
greatest men of letters of the Victorian age — Tennyson, Thackeray, 
and Carlyle ; but he published comparatively little, and that little had 
a rather false appearance of want of originality. His delightful 
letters, published after his death in two collections, first made him 
known to the general. He had written earlier an exquisite Platonic 



CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 737 

dialogue, of deep if not wide or commanding originality, called 
Euphranor (185 1), had translated divers plays of Aeschylus and 
Calderon (1856), and had in 1859 issued a version, also in appear- 
ance a translation, of the Ritbaiyat of the Persian poet, astronomer, and 
Epicurean, or rather Cyrenaic, Omar Khayyam. The first edition of 
this was published in small numbers, and did not become generally 
known, but its efifect upon those who did become acquainted with it, 
and who were prepared for its reception, was extraordinary. It is 
not in the strict sense a translation at all, FitzGerald having combined, 
transposed, omitted, and even inserted, to such an extent that the thing 
is almost as much his own as another's. But the poetical value of it 
is extraordinary. The note, somewhat resembling that of the later 
English Renaissance as presented by Donne, but with a marked 
difference, showing its Oriental suggestion, is one of a musical 
sensuality, intensely fatalist, yet, with the usual inconsistency of 
fatalism, ringing the changes on Carpe diem as well. Nothing in 
English had been quite like the melancholy and voluptuous clangour 
of these rolling quatrains, rhymed as a rule aaba, with the b sound 
left ringing in the air. and not caught up in the succeeding stanza, 
but sometimes monorhymed throughout. His other renderings of 
Persian, Salai)iaii and Absal and the Bird Parlia/nent, less known, 
are only less charming. 

FitzGerald did not admire Mrs. Browning. And indeed no two 
writers could be more unlike, m anything but devotion to literature 
and faculty of poetry. Elizabeth Moulton Barrett, the daughter of a 
wealthy West-Indian, was born in Durham on 6th March g,. , , 
1806, and brought up chiefly in Herefordshire, but Barrett 
afterwards lived much in London. She had, after rowmng. 
her first youth, very bad health, and was an eager though rather 
amateurish reader and student. She published poems at nineteen, 
but she was thirty-two before, in a second volume, entitled The 
Serapltiin, she developed a distinct poetical character ; and it was 
not till the middle of the century was approaching, and her own 
fortieth year was past, that the pieces which really speak her talent 
appeared. In 1846 she married Robert Browning (somewhat after 
the fashion of an elopement). The pair lived chiefly at Florence, 
and had one child. In 1851 she published Casa Giiidi Windows, 
and in 1857 Aurora Leigh, a verse novel-with-a-purpose. Poems 
before Congress came a year before, and Last Poems a year after, her 
death in 1861. Perhaps she had never done anything better than 
" The Great God Pan," which, written just before, appeared in the 
Cornhill Magazine during its brilliant opening year under Thackeray's 
editorship. 

There is scarcely any writer in English deserving the name of poet 
3B 



738 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

who illustrates by defect the importance of poetic style so well as 
Mrs. Browning. The word is constantly used in reference to poetry 
with a sense too general and even improper, but here it can be used 
with exact propriety. In all the qualities (with the exception of ear 
for rhyme) which distinguish the poet from the prose-writer she was 
a very considerable proticient, though even in these she lacked 
self-criticism. She could think as a poet, could feel, though rather 
too gushingly, as a poet, could see, sometimes with eminent clearness, 
as a poet should see, and in some respects had an equally eminent 
gift of poetic music. But in the qualities which the prose-writer 
shares with the poet, and the absence of which, because less common, 
is even more distressing in the latter, she was extraordinarily de- 
ficient. The dulness or falseness of her ear for consonance of sound 
was quite unparalleled, and she, with all the advantages of gentle 
birth, feminine sex, country breeding, and an almost scholarly educa- 
tion, confuses rhymes in a manner usually supposed to be limited to 
the lower class of cockneys. And this insensibility to pure sound 
finds its counterpart in slipshod and tasteless vocabulary, in awkward 
and solecising uses of phrase — in short, in a general slatternliness as 
regards all the minor, and some of the major, points that constitute 
style. 

This carelessness or numbness of feeling extends also to some 
things which lie deeper than style. At hardly any time, except when 
the beneficent restriction of the sonnet braces her up, is Mrs. Brown- 
ing's composition or her conception clear, well-knit, and orderly. 
This flaccidity is indeed a symptom in all the poets of the second 
Romantic school. It had been threatened in Keats; there were 
dangerous appearances of it, fortunately exorcised by the kind cruelty 
of criticism and his own good sense, in Tennyson ; Robert Browning's 
verbosity, his lawless abundance, was perhaps in foct only a rather 
more healthy and vigorous variety of it. But over Mrs. Browning it 
ruled, except in the Sonnets from the Portuguese and a very few 
other pieces. Still, despite the constant imperfection, there is, 
on the whole, a pervading charm, the sense of the vision though 
sometimes not of the faculty. In " Cowper's Grave," in "The Rhyme 
of the Duchess May," in the "Lay of the Brown Rosary," in the 
" Romaunt of Margret " (where the different cadence given to the 
refrain " Margret ! Margret ! " by the form of the name adopted, 
contributes a marvellously new music to the piece, and where, 
terribly as the whole is in need of compression and concentration, the 
separate effects are sometimes quite miraculous), in the " Vision of 
Poets." in " The Soul's Travelling " and the " House of Clouds," in a 
hundred others, we never want more poetry, we only want more 
criticism. 



CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 739 

A paragraph of mention must suffice for some verse-writers more 
than one of whom may be justly called a poet, and who were nearly 
contemporary with these, or at any rate born between Mrs. Browning 
and Mr. Matthew Arnold : the too famous Martin Farquhar Tupper 
(1810-89), the enormous and almost incomprehensible popularity of 
whose worthless Proverbial Philosophy has secured him an uncom- 
fortable immortality, and who wrote much else ; Archbishop Trench 
(1807-86), a popular philologist of great acuteness, an admirable 
judge of Latin Mediaeval poetry, and himself a poet ; Thomas Gordon 
Halce (1809-94), author of much verse, rather too mystical and diffi- 
cult, but always high and often sweet ; Richard Monckton Milnes, first 
Lord Houghton (1809-85), a friend of Tennyson and the immediate 
procurer, though at Carlyle's instigation, of his pension, a great figure 
in society, literary, political, and other, a good critic and an admi- 
rable song-writer; Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), an Irish bard of 
humour as well as of romance ; " Father Prout," Charles Mackay, 
Mrs. Archer Clive (''V") — but especially William Edmonstoune 
Aytoun (1813-65), joint-author of that admirable book of light verse, 
the equal of anything earlier and certainly not surpassed since, the Bon 
GauUier ballads, and author of the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, 
Fin/iilian, Bothwell, etc. Besides Boti Gaiiltier, though of a some- 
what different fashion, must be ranked the Ingoldsby Legends of 
Richard Harris Barham (i 788-1845), who by birth belonged to an 
older generation, but wrote the Legends late. In grotesque poetry 
no language holds their superiors. 



CHAPTER II 



THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 



Dickens — Thackeray — His early work — Charlotte Bronte — Mrs. Gaskell — 
Charles Reade — Anthony Trollope — George Eliot — Charles Kingsley — 
Others — R. L. Stevenson 

There can be little doubt that, great as have been its achievements 
in poetry and history, and not small as they have been in literary 
criticism and the essay generally, the nineteenth century, as a whole, 
will take future rank as the age of the novel. But there was a 
time, covering about the fourth decade of the century, when it might 
have seemed, and did seem to one very acute and well-informed 
judge (Lockhart), that the progress of fiction would be arrested. 
The immense impetus given by Scott appeared to be exhausted with 
himself; the hardly less real revolution introduced by Miss Austen 
was so quiet as to be very nearly imperceptible. Not a few of the 
novelists mentioned in the last Book were writing, and one or two, 
Lever and Bulwer especially, had their best work to come, in 1837, 
and even in 1850. But between 1814 and 1836 no one of absolutely 
the first class put in his titles. 

At this very time, however, there were breeding up, and not even 
in their very first youth, two of the very greatest writers of English 
prose fiction — perhaps, indeed, the only two who can pretend to rank 
with Fielding, Miss Austen, and Scott. These were Charles Dickens 
and William Makepeace Thackeray, who were very nearly of an age, 
though Dickens, a little the younger of the pair, made 
his mark first. He was born in 1812 at Portsmouth, 
where, as subsequently at Chatham, his father was a clerk in the 
dockyard. This father, the original of the "Mr. Micawber " of 
Datnd Copperfield, a novel in great measure autobiographical, lost his 
post in some departmental reconstruction ; and the family for some 
time experienced straits which have left their mark both here and 
elsewhere, especially in Little Dorrit (for Dickens senior, like old 
Dorrit, was a prisoner for debt in the Marshalsea). After a time, 

740 



THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 741 



however, he found work on the press, as did his son, whose education 
was not more irregular than might be expected. Charles himself 
learnt shorthand and became a reporter at seventeen, but wrote, or 
at least pubHshed, nothing till his twenty-second year was nearly 
finished. At the end of December 1833 he began to contribute 
papers, of the descriptive-fanciful kind that Leigh Hunt had intro- 
duced, to magazines, and the Sketches by Boz were collected out of 
these and issued as a book early in 1836, while before the spring of 
that year was over Dickens began the Pickwick Papers and married. 
He was ever afterwards a prosperous man as far as money was con- 
cerned, and Pickwick immediately made him famous. He was soon 
able to leave off all work but book-writing ; he made, by his novels, by 
the periodicals of Household JVords and All the Year Round, which 
he edited, and by reading his own work in England and America, a 
very large fortune for a man of letters, and died suddenly in July 
1870, the most popular author of his day, and with no failure of 
mental powers, though his actual death was due to brain disease. 

Dickens's work was very considerable, and the book part of it, 
after those just mentioned {Pickwick was published at the end of 
1837), appeared as follows: Oliver Twist, 1838; Nicholas Nickleby, 
1839; The Old Curiosity Shop (this and the next at first appeared 
with a framework, afterwards discarded, as " Master Humphry's 
Clock"), 1840-41; Bartiaby Rudge, 1841 ; American Notes, 1842; 
Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843; a series of Christmas Books between the 
latter year and 1848 (this was continued in a way later by his con- 
tributions to the Christmas numbers of his periodicals) ; Pictures from 
Italy, 1845; Dombey and Son, 1846-48; David Copperfield, 1849-50; 
Bleak House, 1852-53; The Child's History of England (his only 
worthless book), 1854; Hard Times, same year; Little Dorrit, 
1855-57; A Tale of T%uo Cities, 1859; The Uncommercial Traveller 
(a better Bos), 1861 ; Great Expectations, same year; Our Mutual 
Friend, 1864-65 ; and the unfinished Edwin Drood, which was ap- 
pearing when he died. Most of these, except those contributed to 
the two periodicals, came out in numbers with illustrations, a plan 
very popular in the middle of the century. 

Although from the first to the last there is unmistakable unity in 
Dickens, and although nobody who had ever read Pickwick could 
mistake Our Mutual Friend for the work of any other author, his 
genius submitted to certain changes, though perhaps it never at- 
tained any great expansion. He had been as a child an enthusiastic 
student of Smollett, and Smollett's i^eculiar construction or absence 
of construction, was reproduced exactly in his earlier work, and did 
not disappear from his later. Nor, thougli this is less generally known, 
does he owe much less to Theodore Hook, who influenced his early 



742 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

novels as much as Hunt influenced his early essays. Pickwick itself 
is merely the picaresque adventure-novel in a modern, more good- 
natured, and slightly softened and exalted form — a set of scenes 
hardly connected at all except by the presence of the same figures in 
them. If Oliver Tivist and Nicholas Nickleby have some approach 
to greater unity, it is only because of the melodramatic interest of the 
fortunes of Nancy in the first case and the poetical justice of the 
downfall of Squeers in the second. Even Martin Chiizslewit, nay, 
even David Copperfield, are chronicles merely. The Old Curiosity 
Shop is not even this ; it depends sentimentally upon Little Nell, 
really on the immortal Dick Swiveller. Doiiibey and Son attempts 
something but does not succeed. From Bleak House onwards 
Dickens did make a strong eftort at connected plots — plots some- 
times, as in the case of Little Dorrit and even Bleak House itself, 
so elaborate as to be in parts unintelligible. But, either as a conse- 
quence or as a concomitant of this, the separate scenes and characters 
lost a great deal of their early fresliness and ease, though tlie real 
appeal, the real merit, of the books always lay in them. 

If we examine Dickens carefully, and without prepossessions, we 
shall find certain gifts the presence of which cannot reasonably be 
disputed, and certain grave faults or lacks nearly as certain as the 
merits. No writer has ever had a more marvellous faculty of 
depicting what may be called town-scenery than Dickens. He can 
give the interior of a house or room, the "atmosphere" of furniture, 
the general air of a street, as no one had given these things before 
him. Further, he can people these scenes with figures which at 
their best have a vivacity, an arresting power, again inferior to none. 
And he can adjust scenes and figures for several purposes, but above 
all for the purpose of humorous action tending slightly to the farci- 
cal, with a felicity in his earlier and better days almost unerring, 
and even in his later seldom far out. Yet it has been questioned 
whether the life with which his scenes and characters are provided 
is altogether human life — whether his world is not rather a huge 
phantasmagoria of his own creation. 

His main, faults again are hardly denied, save by exti^avagant 
adorers. Dickens's range of character, though extensive, was also 
peculiar and strictly limited. He certainly did not draw, with any 
success, persons beyond the lower and the lower middle classes ; and 
the defence sometimes put, that he did not wish to do so, must 
be ruled out, for he tried and failed to do it. His characters of the 
upper and upper middle classes (with wliom, it must be remembered, 
he had, in the time when he was " making himself." hardly associ- 
ated at all. while later he was too busy, too much set in one groove, 
and it may be too prejudiced, to study them with impartiality) have 



CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 743 

not merely the fantastic quality, the doubtful reality, of his Sam 
Wellers and his Dick Swivellers. They are not creatures who, in 
another and slightly altered world, might be real and are still 
delightful, but monsters not suited to any conceivable scheme. The 
relations of the second Mrs. Dombey (except Cousin Feenix, who is at 
least a genial improbability), the society of the Dedlocks, the guests of 
the Dorrits in their prosperity, and some of those of the Veneerings, 
have hardly a touch of life — they are to the human species what the 
fancy birds and beasts, by creating which the late Mr. Waterton used 
to amuse himself and display his skill in taxidermy, were to the actual 
fauna of this earth. Nor is it reasonably deniable that Dickens had 
many irritating mannerisms, a lack of anything like real acquaint- 
ance or sympathy with great and high regions of thought, and an 
unfortunate proneness to talk about what he did not understand. 
But he remains the greatest fantastic novelist of England, and, with 
Balzac, the greatest fantastic novelist of the world ; and his three 
best books, which may be taken to be Pickwick, David Cnpperjield, 
and Great Expectations, are the masterpieces of their special kind. 

William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta (where his 
father, a cadet of a family originally of Yorkshire, and grandson of 
a headmaster of Harrow, was a Company's servant) in July 1811. 
His father died when he was five years old, and his 

■' , Thackeray. 

mother marrymg again, the boy was sent home, and, 
after living at Tunbridge Wells and afterwards in Devonshire, went 
to Charterhouse. He proceeded in 1829 to Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, but took no degree. He contributed, however, to an under- 
graduates' paper. The Snob, and parodied Tennyson's " Timbuctoo," 
or at least wrote a burlesque poem in competition with it, the first 
couplet of which is a pleasant foretaste of his style all through 
life — 

In Africa — -a quarter of the world — 

The men are black, their locks are crisp and curled. 

After leaving Cambridge he travelled in Germany, and began to read 
for the Bar ; but the loss of a competent, though not large, income 
which he had inherited, made some more speedily remunerative 
occupation necessary, and he took to journalism, sinking most of his 
remaining property in running, instead of merely writing for, papers. 
He went to Paris, where his mother and stepfather were living, to 
study painting, for he was much more set on art than even on litera- 
ture, and had, as his illustrations show, great, though curiously 
warped and incomplete, ability therefor. He married in 1836, and 
settled after a time in London, writing busily for all sorts of papers 
from the Times and Eraser downwards. But, after the birth of his 



744 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

third child, his wife's mind gave way, and she never recovered, 
though she survived him for some thirty years. 

Despite what seems, on looking back, the unmistakable, and 
indeed unique, quality of Thackeray's most immature work, it was 
very long before it attained popular recognition, while it never at 
any time brought him anything like the substantial re- 
early work, wards earned by Dickens. But, while the latter never 
much e.xcelled his first distinct essay, it was years before 
Thackeray gave his full measure. His first book, the Paris Sketch 
Book, published in 1840, and consisting of reprints of his work as a 
Paris correspondent for newspapers, is extremely unequal, much of 
it mediocre, some poor, and very little of the best. It had no suc- 
cess, nor had the much more characteristic collection of Tales which 
followed next year, though this contained the Yellowplush Papers} the 
admirable extravaganza of Major Cakagan, and T/ie Bedford Row 
Conspiracy, a story owing a little to Charles de Bernard, but a master- 
piece in itself. Catherine, The Hoggarty Diamond, and The Shabby 
Genteel Story had the same inequality ; while Barry Lyndon, though 
it has long been fashionable to rank it very high, attracted no great 
attention at first, and to some of Thackeray's most fervent admirers 
has always seemed chiefly noticeable as his first display of that 
extraordinary faculty of simulating, or rather re-creating, eighteenth- 
century thought and feeling which he afterwards showed. The Irish 
Sketch Book of 1843, though a book almost peerless in its kind, did 
not please greatly, nor the admirable From Cornliill to Grand Cairo, 
or Eastern Sketches of three years later. Thackeray had reached 
the full limit of thirty-five before thriving in any real literary sense 
seemed possible for him. 

But his luck was now turned by three diiTerent publications — the 
charming trifle of Mrs. Perkinses Ball (1847), which seems at last to 
have converted the public coldness into appreciation; the wonderful 
Book of Snobs (1848), published in Punch; and most of all the great 
novel of Vanity Fair (1848). This last, though at first coldly re- 
ceived, and perhaps not at first displaying its full quality, could not 
fail to win over whatever critics there may have been in England 
(which, by the way, as it happened, was at the particular moment 
by no means overstocked with that article). By the beginning of 
1848, Thackeray was established, in the estimate of the best judges, 
as the greatest living novelist, and he had made himself popular 
enough to secure profit as well as fame. He lectured a little, 
and the lectures gave the admirable essays, rather than lectures, 
known as TJtc English Humourists and The Four Georges (not pub- 

^ The "Yellowplush Correspondence" had appeared even before the "Paris" 
book in 1838. 



CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 745 

lished till later). He continued his Christmas books. But it was of 
more importance that he also continued his great series of novels. 
Pendennis (1849-50), which followed Vanity Fair, was a more 
amusing and genial, if not a greater, book than its forerunner; and 
Estiiond (1852), which followed Pendennis, is among the very 
summits of English prose fiction, exquisitely written in a marvellous 
resurrection of eighteenth-century style, touched somehow with a 
strange modernity and life which make it no pastiche, containing the 
most brilliant passages of mere incident, and, above all, enshrining 
such studies of character, in the hero and heroine in particular, but 
also in others, as not four other makers of English prose and verse 
can show. 

After a tour to America, Thackeray produced The Neivcomes 
(1853-55), ^ book resembling Pendennis, vyith which it was con- 
nected by the reappearance of some personages, but with more 
pathos, though perhaps a little less freshness. He had a bad attack 
of Roman fever in the winter of 1855, and it is beheved that his 
health was permanently affected ; but this stay at Rome saw the 
writing of The Rose and the Ring, the last and best of his 
extravaganza-romances. The Virginians, the novel of the next 
two years (in one of which he stood for Oxford and was beaten), 
exhib'ted something of the inequality of his earlier work, but has 
much of the excellence of the later. At the beginning of i860, he 
undertook the editorship of the new CornJiill Magazine, a. task in 
itself very uncongenial to him. He contributed to it, however, the 
Ronndaboict Papers, which show him to the very last at his very 
best as an essayist ; and furnished it with the slight but amusing 
novel of Lovel the Widower, and the much longer but much less 
good Adventures of Philip. He gave up the editorship after two 
years, but began and carried some way a third novel, the unfinished 
Denis Duval. In this, the old faculty of re-creation, as regards 
scenes, manners, and speech, is unimpaired, but the book is hardly 
long enough to give ground for judging whether the old wizardry of 
cliaracter-drawing v/ould have been retrieved. He was found dead 
in his bed at his house in Kensington on Christmas Eve, 1863. 

Both in prose and in verse (for in a certain humorous-pathetic 
variety of the latter he displayed gifts which very nearly, if they do 
not quite, give him positive and high rank as a poet) Thackeray's 
characteristics, both of conception and expression, are wonderfully 
distinct and extremely original. During bis lifetime some foolish 
persons called him cynical ; since his death, others not more wise 
have called him a sentimentalist. Both judgments were comple- 
mentary exaggerations of the fact just glanced at, that his is the 
extremest known development of that mixture of the pathetic and the 



746 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book XI 

humorous which is latent in all humour, which Shakespeare had 
brought out occasionally — as he brought out everything — which had 
been driven in and turned to a furious indignation by unhappy fate 
in Swift, and which both the time and his own temperament had 
allowed only occasionally to appear in Fielding. An intense 
appreciation of the ludicrous aspects of actual human life exists in 
Tliackeray, not so much alternately as side by side with an equally 
intense appreciation of " the pity of it." At times he may shock 
the weak, at times he may disgust the strong; but hardly ever in 
his master-work is there a real excess in either direction. The 
verse, as usual with the higher form, gives the simplest and best 
expression of this mixture, as in such pieces as the " Ballad of 
Bouillabaisse," "The Age of Wisdom," "Vanitas Vanitatum," and 
others ; but it constantly suffuses the larger and better part of the 
prose with a " humanity " not so much '* terrible," though FitzGerald 
called it so, as wonderful. 

This peculiarity of thought, however, he shares ; his peculiarity 
of expression is, as always with the greatest ones of literature, wholly 
his own. Owing to whatever cause — for his education was not 
irregular, and his literary taste was exquisite — Thackeray was at 
first a rather "incorrect" writer, in the school sense, and he never 
became a very correct one ; but this was of the slightest possible 
importance. We can see in his very earliest writings a pecuHarity 
of phrase, of style in the greatest sense, which is nowhere discernible 
before him, though its easier and more tangible mannerisms have 
been copied by some after him. It is an extremely conversational 
style, and at even its highest pitches it always seems to be 
addressed to a listener, rather than, like some of the great literary 
styles, those of Shakespeare's soliloquies in particular, to be com- 
posed without reference to reading or hearing at all. Thackeray 
always presupposes an interlocutor or at least an auditor, and in so 
far as we can lay the finger on any really formative peculiarity of his 
style, it is this, that he is constantly meeting, as it were, the fancies, 
objections, assents, and the like which he supposes to arise in this 
double of himself. This peculiarity is observable not more in his 
elaborate digressions of "address to the reader" (suggested, as no 
doubt they were, by Fielding's more set exordia) than in the smallest 
turns of his phrase in novel or essay alike. His play on words, — a 
point in which he is again Shakespearian, — his broken sentences, the 
rapid zigzag turns of his thought and fancy, are all due, partly at 
least, to this intense excitement of brain, which overhears beforehand, 
as it were, the coming repartee, comment, annotation, and half 
annexes, half parries it ere it arrives. It follows from this that 
there is no phrase in English so nervous, so flutteringly alive, as 



CHAP, II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 747 

Thackeray's. It stands at the very opposite pole from such other 
phrase as Landor's, which is complete, majestic, imposing, but a very 
little dead — to be contemplated, to be even received with respect and 
admiration by the reader, but separated from him by a gulf. Whereas 
between Thackeray and his reader there is a constant pulse and 
current of sympathetic feeling and thought. The reader knows that 
the author is all attention to know what he will think, what he will 
feel, and he is all the more sensitive to the thoughts and the feelings 
of the author. If we find this anywhere before in English literature, 
we find it in the great fantasts — • Burton and Browne — of the seven- 
teenth century, and just before Thackeray in Charles Lamb, from 
whom, if from anybody, he may have derived hints for it. It may 
also be noticed that he was a constant student of Howell, who has it 
in a far inferior degree, but after something the same kind as his 
greater contemporaries. These gifts, and that other singular one of 
simulating the style of former times, do not fully explain Thackeray's 
mastery, but they are historically noticeable. They would not have 
made him what he is, the recorder for ever of the higher English life in 
the middle nineteenth century, and the creator, in that period and out 
of it, of .Becky Sharp and of Beatrix Esmond ; but they helped him 
to be this, and they made him one of the very greatest of English 
writers. 

The determination of genius and talent towards the novel, of 
which these two great writers were the greatest and earliest expres- 
sion, affected, as we have said, older men like Bulwer and Lever, and 
extracted from them better work than they had at first produced. 
But it was, naturally, shown with more distinctness in younger men 
and women, who may in some cases have imitated Dickens or 
Thackeray directly, but who in most were not their children so much 
as their younger brothers and sisters. 

Among the earliest of these was Charlotte Bronte, a novelist 
whose life has received rather disproportionate and even unfortunate 
attention, but whose work is still very variously judged, and in fact, 
from its peculiarities of circumstance, will probably 
always remain a problem. She was born in 1816, the Charlotte 
daughter of a clergyman of Irish extraction, but beneficed 
in Yorkshire, and she had two younger sisters, Emily and Anne. 
The three in 1846 published a volume of poems under the names of 
Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It attracted no attention, and, so far 
as Charlotte's and Anne's verse was concerned, did not deserve any. 
But Emily had a narrow intense vein of poetry in her, and her 
" Remembrance " and one or two other things are almost great. They 
then tried prose fiction, Charlotte writing The Professor, Emily, 
Wnthering Heights, and Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and 



748 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

Agnes Grey. These two last are ordinary things ; Wuthering Heights 
an extraordinary one, though its merits may be variously judged ; 
The Professor did not in the least give Charlotte's quality, and she 
could not get it published. Nor was she at first more fortunate with 
Jane Eyre, which, however, was at last accepted by Messrs. Smith 
and Elder, and issued in 1847. It was extravagantly attacked for 
''impropriety" and other crimes, but was popular. Yet its author, 
though she lived seven or eight years longer, wrote little more, 
Shirley in 1849, '^^'^ Villette in 1852, neither of them long books, 
being her only completed work. She married Mr. Nicholls, who was 
her father's curate at Haworth. in 1854, and died next year on the 31st 
of March. The Professor also found its way at last into print, but 
her " remains " were quite fragmentary. 

It will thus be seen that the circumstances of Miss Bronte's work 
are rather peculiar. Critics have often to judge from a small amount 
of work, when the author has been precocious and has died young. 
But Charlotte Bronte published nothing of importance till she was 
past thirty, and though she was not far off forty when she died, and 
had a great success to encourage her, increased her work but little. 
In such a case it may at least be doubted whether longer life would 
have given much more work or whether there was indeed much more 
to come. 

But there are other and more intimate features which point to the 
same inference. Of the talent — in fact of the genius in a certain 
flawed and limited sense — of '* Currer Bell " there can be no doubt. 
She followed no one, and many have followed her. Her work, 
however questionable it may be in itself, stands in the middle of the 
century, marking distinctly a transition period. It is distinguished 
as much from Thackeray and from Dickens by a curious spirit of 
irregular and stunted romanticism, as it is distinguished from the 
romantics proper by a realist touch no less unmistakable. 

And yet her limitations are extraordinary. It seems as if, unless 
in the grim-grotesque of parts of Jane Eyre, she could never get 
beyond her personal experiences. The exacter and less dreamy part 
oijane Eyre itself is merely a half-vindictive record of her sufferings 
as a school-girl and a governess. Shirley is, in the heroine, a portrait 
of her sister Emily ; Caroline, it is believed, was another, hardly less 
direct ; the curates and their chiefs are a series of almost libellous 
likenesses. Villette reproduces her stay in Brussels with the same 
audacious fidelity. Out of this circle of personal experiences she 
could never get, or could get out of it only into the imaginary and not 
very worthy society of her Rochesters, in which she certainly created 
the ugly and unattractive hero. 

This indicates, if not a grave fault, at any rate a distinct want in 



CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 749 

her artistic nature. The transcript of personal experience is not 
only a legitimate, but an almost invariable, part of the novelist's re- 
somxes. We have it in Fielding as in Smollett, in Sterne as in Miss 
Burney, in Miss Austen as in Scott, in Dickens as in Thackeray. 
But the novelist cannot, like the poet, " look in his heart," and his 
memory, and write exclusively. The result, save in a person of 
almost supernatural experience and quite supernatural character, 
must be monotonous, and can haixUy fail, even in its monotony, to 
be scanty. Every life (it has been said in many forms) will give one 
book if the liver knows how to write it ; but few lives indeed will give 
more than one. 

There are other things in this curious writer which might be 
noted as faults, as well as some which might be set to her credit. 
But her great merit is that she really did initiate. We had the 
picaresque novel, the romance of adventure, the prose comedy of 
manners and character, the extravaganza, the historical novel, the 
novel intensely domestic. She introduced a new cross and blend 
which was at once domestic and romantic, analytic and imaginative, 
pathetic and ethical — the novel neither namby-pamby nor goody- 
goody, nor idly handling sham terrors, nor clumsily, and without 
magic, trying to emulate the Great Magician's dealings with the past, 
nor decorating the present with mawkish sentiment and third-hand 
rhetoric. In a word, she showed the way, though in her own work 
she hardly discovered the country. 

She was followed, and pretty close, by a group of remarkable 
novelists, most of whom cannot be said to have owed each other 
anything, because they were very nearly of the same age. The 
eldest of the group, who became the biographer of Char- 
lotte Bronte herself, was not the most remarkable, though 
she has her partisans. This was Elizabeth Stevenson, a name in 
which few will recognise Mrs. Gaskell. She was born in 18 10 at 
Chelsea, but was brought up at Knutsford, near Manchester, and in 
1832 married a Unitarian minister of that city. Her first novel of 
importance, Mary Barton (1848), was almost the first attempt 
(though Disraeli had touched the subject in his meteoric way in Sybil, 
and others otherwise) to make the lower life of a great manufacturing 
town, faithfully pictured, into the substance of a novel, rather in the 
way in which Miss Austen had used the life of English parsonages and 
manor-houses than in the fantastic manner of Dickens. It was a 
great and a deserved success. Ruth, five years later, develops the 
more theatrical side of the talent shown in Mary Barton, but Crati- 
ford, its contemporary (1853), is nearer to the actual subjects and 
manner of the mistress — for there can be very little doubt that it 
would hardly have been what it is if Emma had not been written, 



750 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book XI 

though Mrs. Gaskell replaced the sHghtly merciless satire of the 
original with an amiable sympathy, less potent but hardly less agree- 
able. Of the books which followed, till her death in 1S65, Ahvih 
and South (1855), and Sylvia's Lovers (1863), with the unfinished 
Wives and Daughters (1866), may be especially mentioned. In Mary 
Barton the labour-troubles of her scene give her something of the 
extraordinary interest and excitement to which the elder novelists had 
thought it almost obligatory to have recourse ; but in most of her 
other work she dared the dangers of the obvious and found them 
vain. 

Next in order of birth was a slightly eccentric but very powerful 
tale-teller, Charles Reade, who tried all styles, and never did any- 
thing commonplace in any, though perhaps he never turned out an 
actual masterpiece. He was born in 1814, at Ipsden in 

Read" Oxfordshire, of a family of the squirearchy, became a 
Demy and then in due course a Fellow of Magdalen 
College, Oxford, and was called to the Bar, but neither practised nor 
took up any regular employment. After the manner of a French 
rather than of an English man of letters he began with play-writing, 
which he never gave up, though he was not more successful in pro- 
ducing literary drama than most of his contemporaries ; and he did 
not make his mark as a novelist till he was nearly forty, when, in 
1852, he published Peg Woffingtoji. Thenceforward he was a 
frequent, but not too frequent, producer of novels, which he wrote on 
the modern system of " document "-collecting — gathering from news- 
papers and books every particular, about things past or present, that 
he thought might give principal or auxiliary interest to his tales, 
but infusing into each touches of remarkable idiosyncrasy. His best 
books beyond all question are // is Never too Late to Mend (1856) 
and the Cloister attd the Hearth (1861) : the one a story, first of 
brutality towards prisoners in gaols, and then of the new Australian 
gold-fields ; the other a wonderful adaptation, in the special spirit 
of the later nineteenth century, of the Colloquies and other autobio- 
graphical or semi-autobiographical writings of Erasmus, which are 
drawn upon to give a romantic picture of that humanist's father. 
But it may be questioned whether the already-mentioned Peg IVoffing- 
ton and Christie Johnstone (1853), also an early piece, to which 
may be added Love me Little, Love me Long (1859), do not show 
him at his very best, if they are not his very best books, because 
they are less overladen than the others, and still less than his later 
works from Griffith Gaunt (1863) to A IVoman-Hater (1877), with 
" purpose," with " document," with episode, and with digression. He 
died in 1884. 

Yet another year, and in 1815 was born Anthony Trollope, a 



CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 751 

novelist immensely prolific, popular for a time, tliough not quite till 
his death, a good deal underrated since, never perhaps rated or likely 
to be rated by good critics among the first, but sure 
with such critics, sooner or later, of recognition as TroUope' 
interesting and singularly typical. He belonged to a 
literary family, for his mother was herself a popular and prolific 
novelist, and his elder brother, Thomas Adolphus, was a miscellaneous 
writer of industry and merit, chiefly on Italian subjects. Anthony 
himself, though he went for a time to two great public schools, — 
Winchester and Harrow, — was rather irregularly educated on the 
whole, and entered the public service early, reaching a high position 
in the Post Office, and deriving not a few of his scenes and char- 
acters from his experiences there. He had also a rather wide know- 
ledge of different kinds of English upper middle-class society and 
of some of the lower, was an enthusiastic fox-hunter, knew London 
society, literary and other, well, and at the same time had a knowledge 
of the peculiar and characteristic life of cathedral towns which would 
not have disgraced Fielding or Miss Austen. After some initial 
experiments, in which he did not show himself at his full strength, he 
began in 1855 to make his mark with The Warden, and made it 
unmistakably a little later with Barckesier Towers, which wants only 
?i jc-ne-sais-quoi to be one of the greatest English novels. The new 
development of magazines, with serials running through them instead 
of appearing separately in parts, exactly suited Trollope's business- 
like fashions of composition, and contributed enormously to his profit, 
though it may be doubtful whether it did not injure his fame by 
tempting him to over-production. He lived too long even for his 
profit, and he wrote far too much for his fame ; but his truth to life, 
and not merely to external life, was extraordinary, his fertility in 
scene and character wonderful, and his positive power far greater 
than it has recently been usual to admit. As the prince of a wliole 
class of novelists who have flourished throughout the later nineteenth 
century, he at least must occupy a representative position when the 
rest of his tribe are forgotten ; and it is by no means impossible that 
some who go to him merely out of the curiosity aroused by this 
representative jjosition will continue to read him for his intrinsic 
merit. 

1819 saw the birth of two greater writers, though the uncertainty 
of reputation which seems to affect the novelist more than any other 
class has attacked them too, especially the elder. Mary Ann Evans, 
later Mrs. Cross, known in literature as George Eliot, 
was born at Arbury, in Warwickshire, and till the age eHo^^ 
of thirty lived in the same neighbourhood. She wrote, 
or at least published, nothing early, but having altered her religious 



752 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

views, translated Strauss's Life of Jesus, and in 1849 went abroad to 
Geneva. When she returned she began writing for the M'estiuitister 
Revieiu, her essays, reviews, and some further translations of anti- 
Christian work showing ability, but no very great talent, and not 
even an approach to genius. But she met, was attracted by, and in 
a short time went to live with George Henry Lewes (1817-78), a 
somewhat Bohemian man of letters, of great attainments and remark- 
able critical power, who, though apparently unable to produce original 
work of merit himself, seems somehow to have discovered, developed, 
or accidentally started the faculties of his companion. The tales 
called Scenes of Clerical Life began to appear in Blackwood's Maga- 
zine at the beginning of 1857, and next year the more ambitious 
novel of Adam Bede was published. The humour, pathos, and un- 
copied distinction of this hit both the critical and the public tast^ of 
the moment, and the author (who retained her pseudonym, though 
attempts to claim the credit of her work made it necessary before 
very long to disclose her identity) strengthened her position by The 
Mill on the Floss (i860) and Silas Marner (1861). There are 
those who think that, had she died at this time, her reputation would 
have been less exposed to danger than it has actually proved to be ; 
and it is certain that in all her novels after this time there is a shift- 
ing of the ground from the humorous-pathetic treatment of the lower 
or lower-middle provincial classes, which had hitherto been her 
stronghold, and of which she had perhaps exhausted the capabilities. 
But public taste came for a time more and more to her, and Roniola, 
an Italian Renaissance story (1863), Felix Holt (1866), and Middle- 
march (1871) were novels which brought in more fame and more 
profit than any of their time. Indeed, this last, appearing as it did 
just at the time when an engouenient (as the French term it) for 
undogmatic religion, unconventional morality, and apparently free 
thought had set in, made her a sort of coterie-idol. It was for a 
time almost treason to '• culture " not to admire her. Then the tide 
turned, and though her next and last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), 
had a great sale, yet its rather preposterous subject (the delight of a 
supposed young English gentleman in finding out that he is really 
a Jew), and the appalling semi-scientific jargon in which it was 
written, turned most tastes against it. Miss Evans's only later work 
(her marriage with Mr. Cross took place after Mr. Lewes's death 
in 1878, and shortly before her own) was the Impressions of Theo- 
phrastus Such (1879), and was better than it seemed to be, but was 
not popular. Her posthumous memoirs (she died at the end of 1880) 
were rather instructive as biography than interesting as literature. 

In the years which have passed since her death, though her works 
are believed still to be widely read, her repute with the critics has 



CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 753 

decreased out of all proportion to her real merits, though in pretty 
exact proportion to the extravagant heights to which the same critics 
or their lilces had formerly raised it. This factitious height she can 
never recover in the estimate of a competent judgment. But it is 
probable that her four first books in fiction/ with passages in all her 
later, will gradually recover for her, and leave her safely established 
in, a high position among the second class of English novelists, those 
who have rather observed than created, rather unlocked a hoard of 
experience than developed a structure of imagination, who have no 
very good or attractive style, but write clearly and with knowledge. 
And the most saving grace of all will doubtless be found in her 
humour, a variety of that great gift which is not itself of the greatest, 
being partial, entirely absent at times, and never of the most 
abounding or original even at its best, but real, true, and at times 
singularly happy. The same description, though in a less degree, 
will apply to her pathos. 

Charles Kingsley, a little George Eliot's senior (he was born in 
the same year, but earlier, at Holne in Devonshire), might almost be 
described as the counterpart, complete in diiTerence, of that remarkable 
woman. He had the poetry, the eloquence, the varied 
glow and colour, the interest in active life, sport, travel, Kingsley. 
adventure, which she lacked ; but he was destitute of the 
philosophical aptitudes which, not always to her peace, she possessed. 
And though it would be almost as untrue to represent him as desti- 
tute of the power of creating character as it would be to represent 
her as destitute of that of depicting incident, yet he is eminently the 
romancer, she eminently the novelist of their respective time, the 
features of which each reflected with uncommon though divergent 
fidelity. 

Kingsley went first to King's College, London, then to Magdalene 
College, Cambridge, obtained first the curacy and then the rectory 
of Eversley in Hampshire, and spent there a busy and happy, though 
not very long, life, which closed in 1875. Besides his living, he held 
at different times a canonry of Middleham, the Professorship of 
Modern History at Cambridge, canonries of Chester and West- 
minster, and a chaplaincy to the Queen. And he was busy, all his 
life, with literary work rather unusually excellent, considering its 
variety in kind. His verse is not voluminous, but his Saiiifs 
Tragedy (1848) is much above the average of the semi-dramatic 
work of the century, and the small volume, Andromeda and other 
Poe/ns (1858), which chiefly contains the rest of his work outside 

1 She wrote a good deal of verse, of very little merit as poetry, though 
touched occasionally with a certain fervour of undogmatism and other will 
worships. 

^C 



754 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

prose, includes in the title-poem the best, and almost the only good, 
continuous hexameters in the English language ; some of the most 
exquisite songs for music — "The Three Fishers," "The Starlings," 
" The Sands of Dee," and others — that have ever become popular ; 
ballads, from " The Last Buccanier " and " The Red King " down- 
ward, of extraordinary force and fire ; and not one single bad thing, 
nor hardly a weak one, in the whole volume. His sermons, in the 
plainer kind, are of singular goodness ; his miscellaneous essays 
of unusual interest and brilliancy, e-xcept when definitely critical, a 
function for which his prejudices, and his defect in logical power, 
together with a certain tendency to inaccuracy of fact, unfitted him. 
He was for the same reasons not very successful as a historical 
writer, and on one unfortunate occasion, engaging in controversy 
with nearly the most formidable controversialist of the century, 
Cardinal Newman, he experienced a discomfiture which was rather 
due to the blundering of his tactics than to the weakness of his 
case. But his special vocation was fiction, and though his failings 
and inequalities appear fully in his novels, those readers are to be 
pitied who are prevented by them from enjoying work which some- 
times approaches, if it does not actually equal, the very best in 
English, and never leaves the reader long without brilliant consola- 
tions for any disappointment it may have inflicted. Kingsley began 
life as an enthusiastic Carlylian, but with a belief in " the people " 
which he certainly did not learn from Carlyle ; and though his early 
crude "Christian Socialism" was a little toned down by experience, it 
left him to the last a politician more generous than exactly wise. 
At first, however, it helped to inspire, just after the. great Chartist 
year of 1848-49, two novels — Alton Locke (1849) and Yeast (1851), 
the one embodying his experiences of University life and of the 
slums of London, the other touching on Tractarianism, English 
country life, sport, and passing politics, all blended with a passionate 
love-story — which will bear comparison with the first attempts of any 
writer. Indeed, prose fiction had never given anything like the 
splendid pictures of Yeast, inspired partly, no doubt, by Mr. Ruskin, 
though Kingsley was far above mere copying. The power shown 
in these books was applied, in perhaps increasing measure, to a 
dangerous subject, the break-up of the Roman Empire, in Hypatia 
(1853), a book of extreme brilliancy, where the author almost 
entirely eluded the curse that rests on most classical novels. But 
the full range and reach of Kingsley's faculty was not seen till 
Westward Hoi (1854), a novel of Elizabethan adventure, written in 
the full glow of tliat return of patriotic fervour which came upon 
Englishmen with the Crimean war, exhibiting hardly any of his 
defects, and on a wonderfully sustained level of excellence. Some 



CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 755 

have found it "dull," while others, or even the same, have been 
offended by its religious, political, and national enthusiasm. The 
last is not a literary objection ; the first can best be compared with 
Gabriel Harvey's opinion of " that Elvish Queene." Kingsley was 
never again at his best, except in the best parts, which are not the 
whole, of the delightful fantasy of The Water Babies (1863), where 
his magnificent descriptive power, his poetic fancy, and his not 
quite trustworthy, but at best exquisite, blend of humour and pathos 
find scope. Tivo Years Ago (1857), a modern novel referring to 
the time of the Crimean war itself, mingles good and bad in an unsafe 
proportion; and Hereward the Wake (1866), a new rendering, with 
additions, of the adventures of the historical or legendary defender of 
the East Anglian fens against William the Conqueror, does the same 
thing in different material. In inequality Kingsley has few equals, 
in goodness not many more superiors. 

His brother 1 Henry (1830-76) had some of his merits, was a 
better humourist, and perhaps a better novelist, if not so good a 
romancer ; but he had to write for bread, and never succeeded, save 
perhaps once in the Australian novel of Geoffrey Hamlyji 
(1859), in doing himself justice so far as an entire book 
is concerned. But his best and most charming things are to be 
found in Ravenshoe (1862), which, chaotic as a novel, contains 
character, humour, and chivalry that would do credit to the very 
greatest. Wilkie Collins, who was born in 1824, and died in 
1889, was the son of an estimable painter of the English school, 
was a friend and close follower of Dickens, and, during the time 
between 1850 and 1870 chiefly, composed novels. The Dead Secret 
(1857), The Woman in White (i860), No Name (1862), The 
Moojistone (1868), etc., which had a great deal of popularity, and 
may be said to stand about midway between Dickens's and Charles 
Readers in kind, but a good deal below both in humorous and 
romantic quality. Wilkie Collins, however, was in pure literary 
gift inferior to his brother, Charles Alston, who did various things, 
especially the Crjtise upon Wheels, a sort of new "Journey," neither 
wholly sentimental nor wholly humorous, which has a singular 
combination of truth with fanciful grace. Other novelists, Mrs. 
Craik, Major Whyte-Melville, "the author of G^iy Livingstone'''' 
(that is to say, G. A. Lawrence), Frank Smedley, can but receive the 
notice of bare inclusion. But a little more is due to Margaret 
Oliphant Wilson, Mrs. Oliphant (1828-97), who is among women 
novelists the parallel to Anthony Trollope among men for prolific 

lA third brotlier, George, was part author with the Earl of Pembroke of a 
remarkable record of their South Sea experiences, South Sea Bubbles, or The Earl 
and the Doctor. 



756 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

and popular production, for diffused talent, and for having at one 
period (in her case that of the Chronicles of Carliiiffford, 1863-66, 
as in his of the Chronicles of Barsei) shown something like genius. 
Mrs. Oliphant, too, like Trollope, but more copiously, wrote things 
outside fiction, and her last work, the posthumous House of Black- 
wood, was a singularly successful attempt in a very difficult kind. 

Many of the novelists born in the second quarter of the century, 
including their acknowledged chief Mr. George Meredith, are 
still alive, and therefore not to be noticed here. They have all 
exhibited, in different degrees and blends, that characteristic of the 
novel, as it was reconstituted towards the middle of the century, 
which has been noticed above — the preference (with occasional 
divergencies and flights into the historical, the fantastic, and other 
varieties) of strictly ordinary life. It so happened, however, that at a 
still later period, and when a third generation had grown or was 
growing up, popular taste veered somewhat round to the adventurous, 
and in the strict sense romantic ; and as it happens likewise, the most 
remarkable practitioner of this kind by far — a writer not Ies3 note- 
worthy strictly as such than as a teller of tales — has passed away and 
abides our censure. 

This was Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, who dropped his third 

name on his title-pages. He was born on 13th November 1850, 

was educated at Edinburgh, and called to the Bar, but had tastes 

neither for science nor for the professions, and before long 

son^^^" ^oo'^ *o wandering and literature, which remained his 
occupations during the too brief remainder of his life. He 
did not make himself very early known, and, perhaps because he was 
somewhat slow in settling to his real vocation of romance, the public 
did not find him out for some time after he actually presented him- 
self. Before 1883 he had published five volumes, partly reprinted 
matter. 

The first two of these were accounts of eccentric travels, Ah 
Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey (1879); then 
followed two others of essays, Virgitiibus Ptierisqiie (1881) and 
Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1881) ; only at the tail (1882) 
came New Arabian Nights, which he had contributed earlier to a 
periodical called London. The first four were less noticeable for their 
matter (though a strong originality, a pleasant humour, and a great 
faculty of enjoyment were all evident in them) than for a style some- 
times curiously " toTmewted," ne\-er entirely free from labour, but 
always of the most ambitious kind, and constantly on the verge of 
a success from which it was only debarred by the prominence of- 
struggle and reminiscence. The last, with sometiiing of this also, 
showed a daring fancy, a command both of the grotesque and the 



CHAi>. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 757 

terrible, in short a hold on the true Romantic, which escaped the 
vulgar judgment, but was unmistakable to those who could see. 
Both appeals were combined, and forced home upon the most careless 
reader, in the famous story of Treasure Island, which appeared at last 
in 1883. and established Mr. Stevenson's reputation. 

He lived eleven years longer, wandering, partly in search of health 
(he was hopelessly consumptive) and partly from natural errantrv. all 
over the world, till he finally fixed himself in Samoa, where he 
became a sort of white chieftain, interested himself, with characteris- 
tic intensity and half-conscious whim, in native politics, and died 
suddenly in the winter of 1894. He had in the interval published, 
sometimes in ostensible collaboration, many volumes of prose, and 
three of verse. 

These last, A ChihVs Garden of Verse (1885), Underwoods 
(1887), and Ballads (1889), had the note of not always quite 
disengaged originality, which he could not help giving, but do not 
show him to the same advantage as does the prose of Prince Otto 
(1885), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1887), T/ie 
Black Arrow (1888), the Master of Ballantrae (1889), and Catriona, 
the second part of Kidnapped (^i^^t,). This was his last completed 
story, and perhaps his best. At his death he was engaged on two 
others, which he left unfinished, IVeir of Hertmston, an altogether 
masterly fragment, where the presence of his native soil, and the 
strong character of the apparently intended story, seemed likely to 
have got him free altogether from his trammels ; and St. hies, a much 
inferior performance, which reads oddly like an imitation, not of him- 
self, but of some of his own imitators, who by this time were numerous. 

Mr. Stevenson presents for us, in a new and extremely interesting 
form, the problem whether it would not have been better for him to 
have been born in a period not '-literary" at all. In such a case he 
might have written nothing ; but in such a ca.se, had he written any- 
thing, his native fund of humour and of imagination, his hardly surpassed 
faculty of telling a story (though not exactly of finishing one), his wit, 
his command at once of the pathetic and the horrible, must have 
found organs of expression which would not have been choked and 
cliained and distorted as they were by the effort to imitate — to make a 
style eclectic yet original. But we may very well be thankful for him 
as he was. and hope that the first great novelist of the coming century 
will be half as good as he. the last exclusively of the nineteenth. 



CHAPTER III 

HISTORY AND CRITICISM 

Carlyle — His life and works — His genius — His style — Kinglake — Buckle — 
Freeman — Green — P'roude — Matthew Arnold — Mr. Ruskin — Art in Eng- 
lish literature — Symonds — Pater 

There is a certain advantage in taking the prominent departments 
of prose, in any given period, together ; that the prominent depart- 
ments, apart from fiction, of English prose, during the last two-thirds 
of the nineteenth century, have been history and criticism, there will 
be little question ; and, moreover, the two are connected by more than 
this chance linic. As a matter of fact nearly all permanent historians 
of the time, Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, have been critics, even 
literary critics, while Mr. Ruskin, the most prominent critic, pure and 
simple, has paid constant, if sometimes fantastic, attention to history. 
Sometimes, indeed, we may meet with a historian like Mr. Freeman, 
whose taste is not mainly for literature, or with a critic like Mr. 
Arnold, who has a positive distaste for history. But these are 
exceptions which make, not unmake, the rule. As stated before, 
this chapter will be headed by Carlyle, who, though an older man 
than almost any mentioned in this Book, hardly made any definite 
mark till the thirties, and maintained his primacy during no less than 
forty-four years of the reign of Queen Victoria. 

Thomas Carlyle was born on 4th December 1795, at Eccle- 
fechan in Dumfriesshire. He was the son of a stone-mason, and 
both his father and his mother were persons of strong character, not a 
few of their famous son's phrases and ways of speech being, 
it would seem, traceable to them. The parish school, 
the Academy or Grammar School of Annan, and the University of 
Edinburgh, which he entered in his fifteenth year, saw his education ; 
and then, having no fancy for the Church, and less for the Law, he 
became a schoolmaster, and practised that office, against the grain, for 
some years in different places. He did some hackwork for ency- 
clopaedias, etc., and wrote a little for the London Magazine, as he 

758 



HISTORY AND CRITICISM 759 



did later for Fraser and the Edinburgh. Blackwood, a more con- 
genial place than any of these, he seems never to have tried, and its 
Toryism would probably then have repelled him. He lived for a 
time in London, knew Coleridge, wrote (in the orthodox late 
Georgian style, as different from his later and characteristic way as a 
wax candle from a Roman one) his respectable Life of Schiller 
(1825), and in 1826 secured his future career by marrying Miss Jane 
Welsh, a young lady much his superior in position, possessed of a 
small property, attractive, though no beauty, in person, and albeit pro- 
vided, as became a descendant of John Knox, with a quick temper and 
an exceedingly sharp tongue, yet also endowed with something like 
genius, with extraordinary resolution and devotion, and with the prac- 
tical wits necessary to nurse or mother (for it very nearly came to that) 
a dyspeptic, desponding, and extremely unpractical man of genius him- 
self. The small, and probably not very exceptional, unhappinesses of 
the pair have been unfairly made known, and unduly exaggerated by 
comment. But it is not very certain that Mrs. Carlyle would have 
been happier with any one else, certain that she received, as none of her 
contemporaries except Mrs. Tennyson did, the position of " wife to a 
man of genius," which she coveted, and certain also that this genius 
would very likely have come to little or nothing but for her. Carlyle 
retired to his wife's farm of Craigenputtock, in his native county ; 
and between 1828 and 1834, at Craigenputtock, he digested (in so 
far as he ever did digest) the chaos of thought and doubt that had 
been seething in him for a third of a century, acquired his own style, 
and applied it in Sartor Resartus, The Frencli Revolution (at least 
most of it), and by far the greater part of the articles and reviews 
which compose his Miscellaneous Essays. 

The first of these • — one of the wildest books in appearance (so 
much so that it disgusted and frightened most of the subscribers to 
Eraser'' s, in which it appeared), but original and memorable as few 
are — contains, in the guise of an account of the German philosopher, 
Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, and his " philosophy of clothes " (a notion 
borrowed from Swift, as much of the nomenclature is translated from 
Scott), a good deal of autobiography. Entepfuhl is Ecclefechan, and 
the spot of the revelation of the "Everlasting No," nominally the 
Rue St. Thomas de PEnfer in Paris, has been authoritatively identi- 
fied with the junction of Leith Walk and Pilrig Street, on the 
outskirts of Edinburgh. But it also contained the first and almost 
the definite manifesto of Carlyle's celebrated '' Gospel " — a gospe-1 
very negative in general and not in detail very positive, but wholly 
tonic and healthy in its denunciation of the shams which at no time 
in the world's history have been more prominent than in the nineteenth 
century. 



76o VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

In 1834 the Carlyles moved to London, and soon established 

themselves in the Chelsea house which continued to be their home. 

The French Revolution, after being destroyed by acci- 

works^" dent and rewritten, appeared in 1837, and there could 
be no doubt about Carlyle after this. No such com- 
bination of historical research and vivid dramatic quality had been 
seen before. It stands, and ever will stand, alone — at once a 
history of lemarkable accuracy (the errors detected since are all 
trifles) and a romance of hardly equalled splendour. Carlyle lect- 
ured a good deal in his early London years, but only one course 
was published by himself, the Heroes and Hero-Worship of 1841. 
Between this and The French Revolution he had issued the short 
piece on Chartism (not his happiest) ; and with the Heroes, or 
nearly so, apjjeared the first collection of his admirable Essays. His 
peculiar historical method reappeared in Past and Present (1843), the 
earlier part of which is an astonishing imaginative, yet not fabulous, 
reconstruction of the Middle Ages ; and then he set it to a new and 
severe task in The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845). 
These latter documents, many of which are written in the most obscure 
jargon that ever called itself English, are by Carlyle not merely 
woven up, after the fashion which Boswell had begun and Lockhart 
perfected, into a continuous biography, but interpreted with alto- 
gether marvellous patience, ingenuity, and devotion. He did not 
publish anything more till 1850, when the Latter-Day Pamphlets — 
things more like the Sartor in style than anything he had written in 
the interval, and among the greatest of political satires — appeared, 
while he followed them up next year with the quietest, and in the 
common sense most human, of all his books, the Life of his friend 
John Sterling. And then he grappled with the History of Frederick 
the Great, which practically exhausted even his energies for fourteen 
years. The. result was a book as to which some extreme Carlylians 
are in doubt whether to wish or not that he had never written it. The 
hero is quite unworthy of him, the scale and scheme could not be 
made other than scrappy, and few of the incidents and characters are 
of the very first interest. Yet out of the vast miscellany, for that is 
what it really is, almost innumerable things of the first excellence 
may be picked. It was finished in 1865. Carlyle was soon after 
elected Rector by the students of his old University, and, again a 
little later, his wife died. He passed the remaining years of his 
life, which ended in 1881, in arranging his own and his wife's 
memoirs, publishing only a few things — Early Kings of Norway 
(1875) the best. His autobiographical remains were published after 
his death by Mr. Froude — in undoubted good faith, and not to the 
direct annoyance of any reasonable disciple, but with the certain effect 



CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 761 

of for a time alienating the foolislier folk by their nature, and with the 
too probable one of deterring posterity by their bulk. Some day, no 
doubt, a Carlyle will arise for Carlyle himself, and do for him what he 
did for Cromwell if not for Frederick. 

About his genius there can be no doubt from the true com- 
parative and historical view, whatever temporary disturbances and 
displacements of opinion may have been or may be. It has three 
aspects — the first, which concerns us least, that of gen- I 

eral tone ; the next, which concerns us more, that of hand- '^ 8^"'"^. 1 
ling and treatment of subject ; and the last, which concerns us most, j 
that of style. It is because of his peculiar handling and treatment/ 
that Carlyle almost alone, of persons born before the end of the 
eighteenth century, has been included in this Book. Whether the 
nineteenth has developed remarkable types of its own, in life and 
character, may be a question less confidently to be answered in the 
affirmative than most of its children seem to suppose ; that it has 
endeavoured to enter, and to a great extent has succeeded in entering, 
as no other has done, into types and characters of the past, is certain. 
And in this respect no writer has expressed its tendencies more pow- 
erfully than Carlyle. He may almost be said to have been the first 
to present historic characters "realised" after the fashion of the 
novelist, but with limitation to fact. In other words, he wrote history 
as Shakespeare long before and Scott in his own time wrote drama or | 
romance, though he tasked his imagination not to create but to vivify 
and rearrange the particulars. 

The style which he used for this purpose, and which undoubtedly 
had not a little to do with the success of the method, could hardly 
have come into existence except at the time of the revo lt of p rose, 
following that of poetry, against the limitations and con- 
ventions of the eighteenth century. Representing, as it '^ ^ ^ ^' 
did, that revolt pushed to its very furthest, it naturally shocked pre- 
cisians, some of whom are not reconciled to this day ; and it must 
be admitted that it was susceptible of degradation and mannerism 
even in its creator's hands, and has proved, almost without exception, 
a detestable thing in those of imitators. But Carlyle himself at his 
best, and sometimes to his last, could use it with such effect of pathos 
now and then, of magnificence often, of vivid and arresting presenta- 
tion in all but a few cases, as hardly any prose-writer has ever excelled. 
His expression, like the matter conveyed in it, may be too strong for 
the weak, too varied and elusory in its far-ranging purport for the dull, 
too much penetrated with ethical gravity and clear-eyed recognition 
of fact for those who like mere prettiness and mere aesthetic make- 
believe ; but both are of the rarest and greatest. 

Its characteristics, like those of nearly all great styles, are partly 



762 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

obvious, partly recondite, or altogetlier fugitive, even from the most 
acute and persevering investigation. In the lowest place come the 
mechanical devices of capitals — a revival, of course, of an old habit 

— italics, dashes, and other recourses to the assistance of the printer. 
Next may be ranked certain stenographic tricks as regards grammar 

— the omission of conjunctions, pronouns, and generally all parts of 
speech which, by relying strictly on the reader's ability to perceive 
the meaning without them, can be omitted, and the omission of 
which both gives point and freshness to the whole and emphasises 
those words that are left. Next and higher come exotic, and specially 
German, construction, long compound adjectives, unusual compara- 
tives and superlatives like " beautiful! er," unsparing employment of 
that specially Englisli idiom by which, as it has been hyperbolically 
said, every verb can be made a noun and every noun a verb, together 
with a certain, though not very large, admixture of actual neologisms 
and coinings like ''Gigmanity." Farther still from the mechanical is 
the art of arrangement fn order of words and juxtaposition of clauses, 
cadence and rhythm of phrase, all of which go so far to make up style 
in the positive. And beyond these again comes the indefinable part,- 
the part which always remains and defies analysis. 

The origin of the whole has been much discussed. It is certain 
that in his first published book there is, as has been said, no trace of 
it. The Life of Schiller is not very distinguishable from the more 
solemn efforts of Lockhart or Southey ; while in Sartor Resa?-fus, 
partly written almost at the same time, the style is full-blown and in 
its very wildest luxuriance. It used to be put down almost wholly 
to imitation of the Germans, especially Richter; but though some 
influence from Jean Paul is not to be denied, it may be very easily 
exaggerated. Undoubtedly there are some reminiscences of Sterne, 
Jean Paul's master. Carlyle is said himself to have attributed much 
of it to family slang caught from his father and mother, and it is 
certain that there are strong resemblances in it to Scottish writing of 
the seventeenth century of the more fantastic kind, such as that of 
Sir Thomas Urquhart. But we find premonitions of Carlyle in many 
places, even such unexpected ones as Johnson, and on the whole the 
manner may be most safely and accurately described as in the smaller 
part a mosaic from his immense reading, in the larger part due partly 
to the creative, but more to the arranging and transforming, power of 
his own genius. 

The historical production of the latter half or two-thirds of the 
century has been very considerable, but there are perhaps not more 
than four or five other writers who can secure a place here, while even 
in the case of one or two of these objections might be raised. 

Alexander Kinglake, not exactly a great historian, and a con- 



CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 763 

spicuous victim of the temporary craze for devoting histories of 
enormous length to periods of short duration, occupies a very im- 
portant place in the history of English style. He was 
born in 181 1, was educated at Eton and Cambridge, ° 

and, being a man of easy means, spent the rest of his life partly 
as a Member of Parliament, partly in travel abroad, and partly in 
London club-life at home, till his death in 1891. He set a certain note 
of style, with more distinctness and effect than has been always rec- 
ognised, in the brilliant volume of travel called Eotheii, which appeared 
in 1844. Of the brilliancy, and to a great extent the novelty, of the 
style of this there can be no question. But of its positive goodness 
there may be much. The hard brassy flash of almost swaggering 
epigram, which Matthew Arnold later denounced in the History of 
tlie Cri/nean War, is already apparent, and is partly induced by the 
autlior's affectation of a sort of " thorn-crackling " persiflage over things 
ni general, animated by a superficial and deliberate C3'nicism. Nor 
are the contrasted passages of fine writing more agreeable, being 
even more than Bulwer's (which they partly follow) gaudy and 
insincere, while in both keys there is a determination to write unlike 
other people, to be clever at all costs, to unite surprising epithets with 
une.xpected nouns. The general effect is certainly "Corinthian"; but 
the length of the book is not sufficient to make it positively disagree- 
able, and Kinglake's influence, direct and transmitted, has been enor- 
mous. It was perhaps unfortunate for him that he ever undertook his 
vast History of the Crimean War (1863-87). He had many things in 
his favour — personal knowledge of part of the matter, almost unlimited 
access to documents, vivid interest, and, as Eotheii had shown, a pen 
which, to whatever dangers it was exposed, had almost superabundant 
energy, facility, and resource. But all the faults of his style and 
attitude (except that he exchanged that of a cynical flaneur for 
that of a prose epic-maker) reappeared in exaggerated form, and 
were aggravated further by two fatal faults of handling. In the first 
place, going beyond even his models Thiers and Macaulay, he mag- 
nified the scale of his book to a quite intolerable extent ; and, in the 
second, he allowed personal passion and animus to transform parts 
of it into laboured panegyric, and other parts into virulent lampoon. 
In short, great as are the powers which the book displays, it must 
be called, on the whole, an imposing failure. 

Another, though a very different, instance of the influence of the 
idols of the middle of the century is to be found in Henry Thomas 
Buckle, who was born in 1823 (or 1821 ?), was privately educated, 
followed no profession, and died young at Damascus in 
1862. Apart from some unnoteworthy Miscellanies, his 
work is contained in his unfinished Histoty of Civilisation in Europe^ 



764 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

of which two volumes (1857-61) only appeared. Buckle, who was 
a kind of disciple of French Positivism, emulated French writers 
even more in the audacious and fallacious sweep of his generalisa- 
tions, attributing effects in bulk to the simple operation of certain 
physical causes, forcing facts to agree with his theories wherever an 
agreement, even in appearance, was possible, and unceremoniously 
neglecting them where it was not. His style is neither picturesque nor 
elaborate, but very clear and forcible, admitting no doubt about his 
meaning, and at the same time putting that meaning with a vigour 
which the extremely clear styles very often lack. He had no taste, 
not much judgment, a great deal of prejudice, and was almost entirely 
dominated by the unintelligent iconoclasm and anti-supernaturalism 
of the last and the early part of the present century. But his faults 
(except a certain violence) were not English, and he had merits 
which also are not the commonest in English writers, so that he may 
be treated by orthodox critics with more charity than he showed in 
his own unorthodox criticism. 

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-92) and John Richard Green 
(1837-83) stood to each other in the relation of master and pupil, 
while both, though they devoted their chief energies to a period 
which Macaulay despised, owed him a good deal — 
Green a very great deal — in method and style. Mr. 
Freeman, who as a boy was privately educated, but went to Oxford 
and became a Fellow of Trinity College, first distinguished himself 
by work on church architecture ; but this was in his case chiefly a 
means to the study of Histor)-, and he soon concentrated himself 
upon that of England before, during, and for a century or so after 
the period of the Norman Conquest. His History of that event, the 
publication of which occupied the decade between 1867 and 1876, 
was not only the most thorough examination of the subject ever made 
up to its own time, but, whatever minor alterations or supplements 
it may require, is not likely to lose the position of classical work on 
the subject. Also Freeman, whose time was his own, and who was 
a very facile writer, produced largely in book form, and in contri- 
butions to newspapers (only a small part of which was ever collected), 
on the subjects of history, historical geography, historical politics, 
and architecture. He was a very learned, and generally, if not 
invariably, a very accurate writer; and the value of his writings for 
reference and as materials is not easily to be exaggerated. Unfor- 
tunately, he was both prolix and pedantic in his general handling, was 
extremely violent and unfair in the controversies in which he delighted, 
and, besides other defects of style, had almost from the first an irritat- 
ing habit of allusive periphrases partly caught from Gibbon, but used 
without any of Gibbon's matchless judgment. 



CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 765 

He was, however, hardly to be called a picturesque historian by 
direct intention ; his pupil, John Richard Green, was this first of all. 
He was a native of Oxford, and educated first at Mag- 
dalen College School, and then at Jesus College. He 
took orders, contributed a good deal to the Saturday Review, and did 
a certain amount of parochial work in London. His Short History 
of the English People appeared in 1874, and became more popular 
than any other historical work of the century except Macaulay's. This 
book he afterwards expanded somewhat, and supported with a series 
of monographs, which was probably only prevented by his early death 
from forming a valuable historical library. But his fame will rest on 
the Short History, which has, if not a few of the defects, all the 
merits of its popularity. As in Macaulay's case, the accuracy of fact 
is usually scrupulous, but, also as in Macaulay's case (and even to 
a greater extent, inasmuch as Mr. Green took further liberties of 
picturesque style), the facts are generalised, grouped, and rhetorically 
presented in a way not perhaps invariably tending so much to exact 
apprehension of the fact as to striking exhibition of it. 

An almost infinitely greater writer than either of these (who were 
his inveterate and hostile critics), not perhaps in reality much more 
of a partisan advocate than either, but unfortunately the inferior of 
both, to an altogether surprising degree, in accuracy of 
statement, was James Anthony Froude. He was born 
near Totnes in 1818, and died near Salcombe, in the same county, 
in 1894. He was the younger brother of Richard Hurrell Froude, 
Newman's companion in the Oxford Movement, and was, after his 
brother's death, himself for a time much under Newman's influence. 
But the catastrophe of the movement sent him not to Rome but to 
freethought ; he resigned his Fellowship and began to write for a 
living. He had already published two books. Shadows of the Clouds 
(1847) and the Nemesis of Faith (1849). ^i^ magazine and 
review contributions included the admirable Essays, afterwards 
collected as Sho7-t Studies (1867-83). But he had more ambitious 
designs, and being, like most of his contemporaries, bitten with the 
mania for history on an enormous scale, began a great History of 
England from the Fall of IVolsey to the Defeat of the Armada, which 
appeared in twelve volumes between 1856 and 1869, and, though 
attacked with almost frantic bitterness by Freeman and his disciples, 
made a great reputation. This was deserved, despite the faults of 
inaccuracy, of paradox, and of partisanship, which are undeniable, 
because of the merit — at times the transcendent merit — of the 
style, the novel and intense kind of patriotism, and above all, the 
wonderful gift of historic realisation which it displays. This last 
gift Mr. Froude perhaps got from his following of Carlyle, and he 



766 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

possessed it as no other historian of our time except Carlyle has 
had it. 

For a time Mr. Froude edited Eraser's Magazine, and when his 
great book was done he undertook another, extensive but not so 
extensive, The English in Ireland, which appeared in three volumes 
between 1871 and 1874. In this latter year, and again in the 
following, he was sent on a Government mission to the Cape, and 
he extended his journeys to other English colonies, with book results 
— Oceana (1886), 7/^1? Bow of Ulysses (The English in the West Indies) 
(1888). In 1889 he published an Irish historical novel. The T%vo 
Chiefs of Dunboy. At the death of his enemy Freeman, he succeeded 
him as Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and died holding the 
post, his lectures in which had given birth to his two last books — 
Erasmus (1894) and English Seamen (1895). Even in this list not 
a few books have been omitted, such as his admirable Bnnyan (1880) 
and the less good Ccesar (1879). His discharge of his duties as 
Carlyle's literary executor from 1881 onward had brought on him 
much obloquy, and even some accusations of treachery to his friend 
and master; but these latter were absurd, and it probably is for 
posterity to judge whether the apparently ruthless publication of 
private matter was judicious or not. It is indeed probable that in 
his own ironic and rather cynical mood,^ which had been brought 
about in his case, as in some others, by the shock of religious loss, 
Mr. Froude did not fully anticipate the effect which the disclosures 
would have on an age as sentimental in reality as it is pessimist in 
affectation. This temper of his, which is well vouched for, and 
which escapes in a tell-tale manner now and then at corners of his 
books, by no means colours them as a whole, being for the most 
part subordinated to the intense enthusiasm for heroic conduct of all 
kinds which he had learnt from Carlyle himself, and which was of 
the utmost service to him as a historian. In the long run, however, 
he is certain to survive chiefly by virtue of his marvellous style, the 
greatest simple style among English writers of the latter half of the 
century, unless that position be accorded equally — it cannot be awarded 
alone — to his other master, and in a spiritual sense "lost leader," 
Newman. 

Mr. Froude's chief Oxford contemporaries, Arnold and Ruskin, 
were not historians, but the transition from historian to critic, and 
especially from this historian to these critics, is smooth and natural 
enough. Not only did all "feed their flocks upon the self-same 
hill," and in very nearly the self-same years, but all in different ways 

1 The best, or at least the pleasantest, expression of this is the quite charming 
Cat's Pilgrimage, published in 1870, and afterwards incorporatea with the Short 
Studies. 



CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 767 

were products of that incalculable ocean-wave of English thought, 
not even yet half enough allowed for, called The Oxford Movement ; 
and it was merely an accident of individual temperament which led 
one to history, another to literature, and the third to art, as their 
special provinces — provinces from which, however, each diverged 
not a little widely, and in the cases of Arnold and Ruskin not a 
little disastrously. In all, too, whether nominally historians or not, 
reigned the dominant historical spirit of the nineteenth century — the 
unconquerable desire, even in those who think themselves most busy 
with the present, to know first of all what the past has said and 
thought and done, if only under the pretext of applying the discovery 
to their own times. 

The chief dates and events of Matthew Arnold's life will be given 
below in connection with his poetry. He was not very early known 
to the public as a critic or as a prose-writer on other than official 
subjects, though the Preface of 1853 revealed him in 
both these characters to those who could read. By Arnold!^ 
degrees his contributions to magazines, and his growing 
reputation at Oxford, widened the circle of those who could appreciate 
him, and the main doctrines of his Essays in Criticism (1865) — the 
good influence of Academies, the " Philistine " tendencies of English 
thought and style, the necessity of adhering to the ancients and the 
grand manner, the deficiency of his countrymen in ideas, and the 
like — may be seen to some small extent in the writings of those who 
had read him before the publication of the book. That publication, 
however, established his position — a position which he held, and to 
some extent enlarged, during the next twenty years. He was, more- 
oven Professor of Poetry at Oxford between 1857 and 1867, and 
his lectures took book form, principally in two very interesting 
works of criticism, On Translating Homer (1861) and On the Study 
of Celtic Literature (1867). It cannot be said that at any time he 
was popular, or that any of his writings had a very wide sale. But, 
speaking as he did from the very first as one who had no douljt 
of his own authority, that authority was gradually accepted — never, 
indeed, without dissents — in his proper province of literature. 
Unfortunately, he was tempted, according to his own revival of the 
Greek doctrine of the philosophic position, — which he practically 
identified for modern times with that of " culture " or literature, — to 
stray from this proper domain into others. The quaint and long 
unreprinted Friendship's Garland (1871), in which, on the text of 
the Franco-Prussian war, he took occasion to reproach his country- 
men with their inferiority to Germany in politics and practice gen- 
erally (just as he had reproached them with their inferiority to 
France in Ideas, Sweetness, Light, and so forth), redeemed, indeed, 



768 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

an excessive affectation of tone and style, and some rather ephemeral 
jocularity, by great liveliness of rather mannered satire, and by a 
considerable undercurrent of truth. But a series of works, mainly 
on theological subjects, — Culture and Anarchy (1869), St. Paul and 
Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), ^^d and the 
Bible (1875), — occupied too much of his time and was not fortunate. 
The air of jaunty infallibility, which had sometimes jarred even in 
matters where the speaker's competence could not be denied, and 
which, after all, were matters of taste or nothing, sat but ill on one 
speaking as an amateur on the gravest subjects. 

Fortunately, Mr. Arnold returned before his death to his proper 
sphere, and, in ways not always free from the defects acquired in this 
theological escapade, added not inconsiderably to his total stock in 
his real business. Mixed Essays (1879) and Essays in Criticism 
(second series, 1888) contained much admirable work; Irish Essays 
(1882) and Discourses in America (1885) contained some. This 
business was in effect the inculcation — by dint of exhortation in a 
very peculiar, slightly wearisome, and often very faultily mannered, 
but at its best incomparably dainty, elegant, and fascinating style — of 
a literary attitude which had perhaps always been too rare in England, 
and which, during the Romantic revolt, as well as during the Classical 
domination, had been almost unknown. This was what may be 
called the comparative attitude in literary criticism, the comparison 
taking in not merely the ancients but moderns of all times. By 
virtue of one of his characteristic crotchets, Mr. Arnold declined to 
infuse this comparison with the full historical sense which it, in fact, 
requires, and of which it is in reality the child. He erected certain 
standards and barriers, sometimes just enough, sometimes quite 
arbitrary, which he called "the grand style," "high seriousness," and 
so forth. We were to admire the Greeks and in a less degree the 
Latins ; but we were not to admire, save very moderately, the men of the 
Middle Age other than Dante. The French were held up as models 
in some ways ; but Mr. Arnold could not honestly recommend French 
poetry. Shakespeare had the grand style only by accident. Chaucer 
had not high seriousness. In short, no criticism, judged by individual 
utterances, is much more piecemeal, arbitrary, fantastic, and unsane 
than Mr. Arnold's own, austere demander though he be of order, law, 
and sanity in literature. Nevertheless, the general effect of this 
criticism was w'holly useful and good ; and if it be somewhat 
unhistorical to say that it changed critical habits in England for the 
better, it is not in the least unhistorical to say that it was the first 
important .symptom of such a change. The criticism of the 
Romantic school had been great, but by force of genius rather 
than learning, and it had, even in the hands of such men as De 



CHAi'. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 769 

Quince}', much more of Hazlitt and Lamb, been far too insular. The 
criticism of the second generation had not been great at all, or where it 
had possessed greatness, as in the cases of Macaulay and Carlyle, had 
not been strictly literary. Even French criticism (to which Mr. 
Arnold resorted for help, especially from Sainte-Beuve) was in his 
own time changing for the worse, and becoming, in the hands of Taine 
and his followers, a barren branch of pseudo-science, busying itself 
with question-begging and otiose problems of race, tendencies, and 
the like, instead of attending to the pure art of literary comparison. 
Accordingly his theory, if not his practice, especially at a time when 
study of the classics was being ousted from the place which it had so 
long rightfully held, was valuable. And though the style in which it 
was expressed was by no means faultless, yet it could not but gain 
from that style — one of almost impeccable correctness in formal 
points, glittering but not gaudy at its best, possessing the indescrib- 
able rhythm, which is never metre, of the best prose, pure without 
being pedantic in vocabulary, and at least sometimes attaining the 
very and mere salt of classical elegance. 

The other writer who has been specially mentioned (the only 
living writer who takes full place in this book) exhibits most excel- 
lent difterences. IVIr. John Ruskin was born in London on 8th 
February 181Q, and educated at home chiefly, his father, ,, „ ,. 

, . , , ^ ■' . . Mr. Ruskin. 

who was a wine merchant and a man 01 means, havnig 
a house at Denmark Hill. He went to Oxford as a gentleman- 
commoner of Christ Church, gained the Newdigate for a poem on 
Salsdte and Elephanta in 1839, and took his degree in 1842, being thus 
entitled to describe himself in his first work, Modern Painters^ which 
followed next year, as " a graduate of Oxford." Mr. Ruskin was an 
ardent student of art, in which, as far as drawing, if not painting, 
went, he attained considerable proficiency ; but his real weapon was 
the pen, not the pencil. His first purpose in using it was the 
extolling of Turner above all painters of his own day and most of 
days past ; but the book, which extended to five large volumes and 
occupied seventeen years in composition and publication, turned to a 
vast assemblage of what the Middle Ages would have called " quod- 
libetal questions" — discussions on all matters connected, and some 
hardly connected at all, with art. Nor did the author confine himself 
to this ample channel for discharging his opinions and employing his 
unique style. A much shorter treatise, The Seven Lamps of Archi- 
tecture, appeared in 1849, "^^^ ^^'■^ Stones of Venice, in scale and 
character almost as ambitious as Modern Paiiiters itself, in 1851-53; 
while between 1855 and 1859 Mr. Ruskin took up, as he had done 
earlier, the cudgels for the English Pre-Raphaelite school in a series 
of "Academy Notes." He issued two sets of Lectures on Architect- 



770 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

ure and Painting (1854), and began to diverge into somewhat alien 
paths with The Political Economy of Art (1857). He had also 
written, with other things, N'otes on the Construction of Sheepfolds 
(1851), the title showing an ingenious perversity which gained on 
him; a fairy story, The King of the Golden River, \n 1854, etc. 

In the succeeding decade or so he wrote no large books, but a 
crowd of small ones, most of them titled in the fashion above noted — 
The Ethics of the Dust and The Crown of Wild Olive, 1 866 ; 
Sesame ana Lilies, 1865; The tjueen of the Air, 1869; U?do this 
Last, 1862; Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne, 1867 — in which he 
applied his peculiar method, always intertwisting a strand of reference 
to morals and another to art, to almost every conceivable subject — 
literature, political economy, mythology, and physical science, in fact, 
the whole encyclopaedia, with the contents of any daily newspaper 
thrown in. Yet another decade saw him Slade Professor of Fine 
Art at his own University (1869-79), and witnessed the addition to his 
miscellanies of Munera Pulveris, 1862-63; Aratra Pentelici, 1872; 
The EagWs Nest, 1872; Lovers Meinie, 1873; Ariadne Florentina, 
1876; The Laws of Fesole, 1877-79, ^'^^•'•, while between 1871 and 
1884 he issued what can perhaps best be called an autobiographic 
chronicle, with digressions, entitled Fors Clavigcra. He established 
himself after a time at Brantwood, on Coniston Lake, and for the last 
few years no new publications have issued from him, though new 
editions, and more than one or two recastings of the mighty Moderti 
Painters, his magnum opus, have to be added to the list already 
given, which is of itself not nearly complete. 

An influence of such volume, of such peculiarity, and dn-ecting 
itself in so many ways could not but have great and manifold results; 
and it is not entirely easy to separate those which directly concern 
literature from those which indirectly concern it. Mr. Ruskin has 
written a great deal on literature itself, and has said many very true 
and beautiful things, but also not a few rather false and silly ones. 
But he is most important for us, first and chiefly because of the 
unique character of his style, and secondly because of the way in 
which he not only once for all gave the subject of art a firm hold 
upon English literary treatment, but affected literature itself most 
powerfully by influences drawn from painting and sculpture. 

Up to the time of the appearance of Modern Painters, the arts of 

design had had but little literary treatment in England, and had 

exercised still less influence upon literature itself. Towards the end 

of the seventeenth century Evelvn. Pepys, and Roger 

"^lii'eratufe.'* North had shown an intelligent connoisseurship, and 

Dry den had written a remarkable, if rather " outside," 

essay on the parallel of Poetry and Painting. Horace VValpole had 



CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 771 

had for the subject not the least shicere of his many fancies, 
and Sir Joshua Reynolds's very remarkable Discourses had bestowed 
on it formal state and rank. The two greatest of the Romantic 
critics proper, Lamb and Hazlitt, had had a great love for, and 
the latter a considerable knowledge of, it ; while Hartley Coleridge, 
if not his father, had the same bent. But despite all this, and 
despite the farther fact that it had been the fashion, ever since Charles 
I. set it, for men of rank and wealth to import objects and make 
collections, the subject had taken no real hold of literature ; and the 
general attitude of men of letters to artists was, if not one of posi- 
tively sneering superiority, yet one of patronising condescension. 
The position, the genius, and the intimate connection with letters and 
men of letters of Reynolds himself, with the establishment of the 
Royal Academy, and the favour (if not a very discriminating favour) 
shown by George III. to art, began to alter this; the half-mis- 
understood "Picturesque" of Gilpin and his followers helped the 
alteration ; and when, after the cessation of the Napoleonic wars, the 
English began to return to the Continent and investigate its treasures 
in a less conventional fashion than that of the old '-grand tour," a 
much greater impetus was given to art-study. This also helped, and 
was helped b)', the determination of the poetry of the younger 
Romantics — Shelley, Keats, and most of all Tennyson — to the visual 
effect. When Mr. Ruskin was a mere boy, the marvellous gallery 
of landscapes and figure-pieces in Tennyson's Palace of Art and 
Dream of Fair Women had definitely "placed" the new method 
in poetry ; while Landor, De Quincey, and, in his splashy and un- 
certain way, Wilson, with such minor and very different figures as 
Wainewright and Darley, had even earlier done the same for prose. 
But Mr. Ruskin gave the method an extension which could hardly 
have been dreamed of by readers of the men just mentioned. In 
his three great early books almost every aspect of natural scenery, 
almost every masterpiece of pictorial and architectural art, in Europe 
was described with a fervour, with a minuteness, with a poetic con- 
vincingness of imagination, and above all, in a style, which had never 
been known before. From that time the blending of the two arts, as 
far as literature was concerned, and the place of the younger sister or 
sisters in literary treatment, was assured. 

The most important agent in this, of course, was the style. 
Here, as so often in very great style, there is no single or obvious 
trick — no Lylyan antithesis and simile, no Johnsonian parallelism and 
balance, to put the finger on. Rhythm, as in all the great prose artists,, 
is, of course, Mr. Ruskin's principal weapon ; and it is of a piece 
with the wilful lawlessness and want of self-criticism which distin- 
guish all his work that he too often transgresses the boundary between 



772 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

rhythm and metre. Tlie imbedded blank verse is altogetlier too 
frequent in his prose. But the fault is rendered less apparent by the 
extreme length of his sentences. He is the first writer since the 
seventeenth century who has dared, not once or twice in a way — Burke 
did that — but constantly, to indulge in sentences of twenty or thirty 
lines, nay, of more than a whole page, in length ; and while the 
metrical passages act to some extent as buoys and corks to keep this 
length floating, they are also to some extent lost in it, and do not 
offend the ear as they would in smaller units. This extreme length 
is also partially justified by the fact that Mr. Ruskin, even when 
nominally arguing, is for the most part building up pictures for the 
eye by successive strokes, and that that faithful organ retains the 
earlier and accepts the later touches with docility. It is also to be 
said as one of his highest commendations that, magnificent and vari- 
coloured as is the effect, he is by no means a " fine writer " in the 
ordinary sense. He does not affect unusual words ; he is by no 
means jDrodigal of adjectives, unless they are. strictly speaking, 
wanted ; and, above all, he is entirely free from the besetting fault of 
the generation which has succeeded him — the quest for unusual and 
surprising conjunctions of phrase. That he learnt a good deal from 
Carlyle is not disputable ; but he used what he learnt in quite differ- 
ent mateiial, and with a totally different literary, though not a very 
different moral, effect. 

Although, as usually (and negligibly) happens, Mr. Ruskin's 
ideas, when their first stage of unacceptance and their second of 
acceptance were over, came to be cavilled at and pooh-poohed, 
nearly all writers since have in some ways been affected 
by them. The two most noteworthy of these were Mr. 
Symonds and Mr. Pater. John Addington Symonds was born in 
Bristol in 1840. He was the son of a local physician of very high 
repute, was educated at Harrow, whence he passed to Oxford (Balliol), 
and as a Fellow to Magdalen. He succeeded rather early to more 
than a competence, and, suffering from comsumptive tendencies, spent 
most of his later years at Davos in the Engadine. He died at Rome 
in 1893. He wrote both in verse and in prose, but in verse pro- 
duced nothing of real importance. Even in prose his work was 
marred not merely by an extremely flower}' style, which did not 
attain to the higher characteristics of Mr. Ruskin's, but by a flux of 
verbose prolixity with which, copious as has been the production of 
the author of Modern Painters, no one could charge him. Even 
Symonds's chief and really important book, the History of the Renais- 
sance in Italy (1875-86), would bear much compression, and almost 
every one of his numerous volumes of essays imperatively calls for it. 
This could not justly be said of Walter Horatio Pater, who was 



CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 773 

born in London in 1839, was educated at the King's School, 
Canterbury, and passing to Oxford, became in due time a Fellow of 
Brasenose, which position he held for the rest of his life, 
though latterly he lived a good deal in London. He 
printed nothing except contributions to magazines till he was nearly 
thirty-five, and his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which 
appeared in 1873, was a very carefully selected, and still more care- 
fully revised, body of essays, scarcely exceeding two hundred pages 
in length. It displayed a most elaborate and novel style, and in 
its few words conveyed something like a complete life-philosophy, 
inculcating the cultivation of, and carefully measured indulgence in, 
aesthetic pleasures, as practically the one thing to be heeded. But 
the book rather attracted the attention (and not always the admira- 
tion) of the few than the worship of the many, and Mr. Pater 
published no other for all but ten years. Afterwards he was a little 
more prolific, and some posthumous publications (he died in 1894), not 
always adjusted for press with his own anxious care, have appeared. 
His manner and matter are best seen in the Studies, afterwards 
reissued, with some slight alterations ; in Manns the Epicurea7i 
(1885), a longish novel, not at all of action, of the second century; 
and in the volume of essays called Appreciations, which opens with 
a deliberate essay on " Style." ^ 

On this last point Mr. Pater's theory and practice coincided 
with, but were hardly derived from, those of the great French 
novelist Flaubert, whose doctrine of the ''single word," or unique 
phrase which alone will express the author's meaning, he almost fully 
accepted, though he saw some of its dangers and (in fact) absurdities. 
His own practice included the careful building up of clause, sentence, 
and paragraph, the constituents and the total being equally regarded ; 
a cunning scheme of rhythm, which never transgresses the bounds of 
metre ; and an almost excessively sifted vocabulary, in which epithet 
and noun are chosen with attention to a certain effect of strangeness 
— a slight shock of not unpleasurable surprise. This is an old trick, 
to which, from its earliest important practitioner in their language, 
the French had applied the term Marivandage. Its general effect in 
Mr. Pater's own best passages is one of extreme beauty ; indeed, 
these passages rank with the choicest in English. Bat not very 
seldom in himself, and very frequently indeed in his imitators, there 
resulted a new Euphuism which is rather disastrous. 

1 Mr. Pater's other works in his lifetime were Imaginary Portraits (1887), 
a book of remarkable imagination, more nearly approaching the creative than 
most of his work, but unequally written ; and Plato and Platoiism (1893). 



CHAPTER IV 

POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 

Matthew Arnold — The " Spasmodics " — Clough — Locker — The Earl of Lytton 

— The Pre-Raphaelites — Their preparation — Dante and Christina Rossetti 

— William Morris — O'Shaughnessy — Others 

There can be little hesitation in dating a change in attitude towards 
poetry from about the middle of the nineteenth centur}', when the 
powers of Tennyson and of Browning, if not universally recognised, 
were still thoroughly manifested. This change, which has resulted 
in verse, sometimes not far, if at all, below the level of the best of the 
first and second Romantic periods, exhibits, except in the single 
instance of Mr. Swinburne, a somewhat greater resort to extrinsic 
sources of interest — a kind of relapse upon the classics in Matthew 
Arnold, a double dose of Mediaevalism and Early Renaissance touches 
in the Pre-Raphaelites, and later still sporadic and spasmodic excur- 
sions or returns to science, to Wordsworthian gravity of expression, to 
this or that reinforcement or crutch. In other words, there is a 
slight want of confident originality and independence. 

The most interesting names, or groups of names, here, are those of 
Mr. Arnold by himself, of the abortive " Spasmodic School " a little 
later, and of the by no means abortive Pre-Raphaelite group later 
still ; while, though many of the later-born individuals, including the 
great poet referred to in the last paragraph, are alive, and so excluded 
from treatment, the " abhorred shears " have already given us but too 
many subjects. 

Matthew Arnold was the eldest son of a man less well known 

than himself, and already registered in this book, Thomas Arnold, 

headmaster of Rugby, and historian of Rome. He was born in 

1822, and educated at Winchester, Rugby, and Balliol, 

Arnoldl^ from which last college, having previously obtained the 

Newdigate, he passed to Oriel, where he was elected 

Fellow in 1845. He did not, however, take college work or 

remain in Oxford long, but after serving as private secretary to 

774 



CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 775 

Lord Landsdowne, married, and accepted an inspectorship of schools 
in 1850. He had akeady — with '"By A "only on the title-page — 
published in 1849 ^^^^ Strayed Reveller and oilier Poei/is.^ The 
same initial appeared on the title-page of E>npedocles on Etna, 1852. 
But it was in 1853, when he was just over thirty, that he gave, with 
his name, the measure at once of his creative and critical powers 
t)y a collection of verse, prefaced by an extremely noteworthy dis- 
cussion of poetry, the first of his attempts at critical disquisition. 
In this he took, and for the rest of his life never ostensibly 
abandoned, an attitude towards poetry which was partly a reversion 
to, and partly an extension of, the Aristotelian theory, making it 
depend wholly upon the choice, conception, and conduct of the 
subject. Mr. Arnold did not indeed, like Wordsworth, dismiss 
metre as merely facultative, but neither did he, on the other hand, 
like Coleridge, actually, if not explicitly, point out its necessity. 
And his criticism, like that of every one almost without exception of 
the same school, is accordingly vitiated by the glaring contradiction 
that, while as examples of poetry he invariably takes works of metre, 
there is not, on his principles, any reason why he should not take works 
in prose. 

His poetical practice displays something of the same inconsistency, 
or at least dichotomy. He is most consistent in employing, or at 
least endeavouring to employ, a severer kind of diction and versifica- 
tion, drawing itself back from the florid and flowing Tennvsonian 
schemes toward the stiffer movement and graver tones of Words- 
worth, Gray, and (in his later years) Milton. He eschews — on 
principle or from a secret sense of inability to arrange them — the 
looser lyric measures, and sometimes seems to seek, especially in The 
Strayed Reveller, for a substitute in simple decasyllabics, broken up, 
for no sufficient reason, into fragments. He also attempts, here and 
elsewhere, unrhymed measures other than ordinary blank verse, and 
with the usual unsuccess. 

But, like his nearest master Wordsworth, he is seldom or never 
really successful except when he discards, or at any rate conveniently 
forgets, his theories. It is a little surprising that he did not oftener try 
the sonnet, which in itself meets his views better than most things, from 
the happy compromise it affords between importance of matter and 
beauty of form, and in which he gave one splendid example — that on 

1 Since his death the Newdigate poem on " Cromwell " (as usual, in couplets), 
the still earlier " Alaric at Rome," a Rugby prize poem in six-lined stanzas written 
in 1840, have been reissued, with all the poems up to 1853, by Dr. Garnett 
(London, 1896). As for his later poetical publications, a second series of Poems 
followed in 1855, Mo-ope in 1858 ; then prose absorbed him mainly till the Ah'w 
Poems of 1867, and he wrote little verse later, though some fine things. 



776 VICTORIAN LITERATURE 



Shakespeare — and others that are fine. But even here, and still more 
elsewhere, he is an unequal poet — a poet who frequently breaks down. 
And in the direct teeth of his theory he is, as mucin as any poet of 
the century, a poet of fine things, of passages, of fragments, sepa- 
rable to the greatest advantage from the wholes in which they appear. 
The splendid blank-verse perorations of " Mycerinus " and " Sohrab 
and Rustum " ; the outburst on " Isolation " — " Yes, in the sea of 
life enisled" — -which, with some other things, redeems the inequality, 
and in parts the doubtful taste, of " Switzerland " ; the beautiful 
snatch of " Requiescat " ; the gorgeous stanzas of "The Scholar 
Gipsy," "Thyrsis," "Westminster Abbey"; the musical, if ever so 
little fantastic and insincere, melancholy of " Dover Beach " and " A 
Summer Night '' ; and above all, the famous " Forsaken Merman," 
the one completely successful monument of his combined poetic 
feehng and art — all these are better on the theories he combated than 
on the theories he held. In all of them Mr. Arnold was different 
rather in intention, and in a certain deliberate, but not always 
maintained, dialect than in real kind, from the seniors or juniors 
whom he regarded with very lukewarm admiration, and whose way 
he did not hesitate to pronounce wrong. The elaborate simile 
at the end of " The Scholar Gipsy " — some twenty lines long — might 
take place as well in a poem on " Timbuctoo," and could be 
transferred thence to one on the " Battle of Armageddon." His 
longer things — Merope. a stiff pseudo-Greek play ; Eiiipedocles on 
Etna, a chaotic and unequal medley with delightful bursts ; Balder 
Dead, a simple-seeming narrative ; Tristra/n and Iseiilt, an un- 
achieved romaunt — besides those named, are always unsuccessful as 
wholes. But when we remember such bursts (and there are scores 
of them) as the distich — 

Still nursing the unconquerable hope, 
Still clutching the inviolable shade — 

then we know that Mr. Arnold was a poet of the true nineteenth- 
century fashion, and a great one almost against his will. He has 
the real throb and cry, the indispensable "moments," the faculty of 
transforming and transcending; and if these gifts are beset with 
hesitancy and checked by theoretic rules, this is rather our loss than 
his disqualification. His criticism, invaluable as an intention and 
exhortation, will soon be, if it is not already, little more ; his poetry 
is poetry, and therefore immortal. 

The " Spasmodics " of the middle of the century — Mr. P. J. 
Bailey, the still living author of Festiis (1839), Sydney Dobell, Alex- 
ander Smith, and perhaps a few others, such as Ernest Jones, the 
Chartist lawyer — included some men of talent, but they are chiefly 



CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 777 

interesting because they show a premature and unsuccessful attempt 
to do in one direction what Arnold attempted in another — to improve, 
though in this case rather by advance than by reaction, 
on the form of Tennyson. Their desire was to be more « Spasmodics." 
modern, more "thoughtful," and at the same time 
slightly more ungirt in form. Sydney Dobell, born at Cranbrook in 
Kent in 1824, was privately educated, succeeded his father as a 
wine-merchant at Cheltenham, and was well favoured by circumstance 
except in the matter of health. He published a closet drama. The 
Roman, in 1850; and another. Balder, in 1853; a little later he pub- 
lished poems on, and inspired by, the Crimean war ; but nothing further, 
though he lived for twenty years, dying in 1874. His best and best- 
known thing is the ballad of "• Keith of Ravelston " (not called by 
that name), where, as sometimes elsewhere, he has touched a string 
of half-unearthly music, redeeming a total want of self-criticism in his 
general work, and a tendency to rant and gush and frigid triviality. 
In fact, to read Dobell as a whole (his works were posthumously 
published) is a disastrous experiment. Alexander Smith, who, born 
at Kilmarnock in 1829 or 1830, ended his days as secretary to the 
University of Edinburgh in 1867, began about the same time as 
Dobell with a Life Drama, also showing a slight tendency to rant, 
but truer and less unequal as a whole than DobelPs work though 
without its occasional " cry." He followed this with City Poems 
(1857) and Edwin of Deira (1861), his last consumptive years 
being chiefly occupied by prose. These men are rather more 
interesting historically than individually, but they do not lack indi- 
vidual interest. 

Arthur Hugh Clough bears some curious resemblances to Matthew 
Arnold, whose intimate friend he was, and who celebrated him in a 
famous following of Lycidas and Adonais. He was a slightly older 
man, having been born in 1819, and was educated at 
Rugby and Balliol, the ferment of the Oxford Move- °"^ ' 

ment sending him into freeth inking. He resigned, in 1848, a Fellow- 
sliip to which he had been elected at Oriel, and betook himself first 
to teaching and then to Government work in the Education Office. 
He died in 1861. Clough was an odd mixture of Arnold and of 
the Spasmodics, with a kind of distorted and cankered Tractarian 
element differentiating him still further. This sort of distraction 
could find no satisfactory poetic utterance. In his early work, 
Ambarvalia (1849) and the BotJiie of Tober-na-Vnolich (1848) (the 
latter written in bad hexameters), as in the later Amours de Voyage 
and Dipsychtis, there are good bits, scraps, passages. But he has 
hardly written a single poem, however short, which can be said to be 
good as a whole, and perhaps his greatest title to poetic fame is the 



778 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

one exquisite and exquisitely expressed image of the rising tide quoted 
at the beginning of Book X. p. 653. His "New Decalogue" and 
one or two other things seem to show that, with more detachment 
and self-command, he might have done better in satirical than in 
serious verse. 

No doubts choked or chequered, or were, at least in appearance, 
allowed to appear in, the sunny work of Frederick Locker-Lampson, 
who was born in 1821 and died in 1895. His books are two only, 
London Lyrics (1857) and Patchwork (1879), while 
Patchwork is in part only a commonplace-book of verse 
and prose. In the original parts of it, and in the verse of London 
Lyrics^ Mr. Locker obtained a secure position among the little band — 
half a dozen strong at most, if so many — of the writers, with capital 
effect, of verse and prose '' of society " in English. 

Very much more ambitious and prolific was Edward Robert, the 

first Earl of, and second Lord, Lytton, long known in literature as 

"Owen Meredith." Born in 1831, and educated at Harrow, but not 

at Oxford or Cambridge, he entered the diplomatic 

Lytton.° service at an unusually early age, discharged its duties 
in various parts of the world, became Viceroy of India 
in 1876, and died at Paris, where he was Ambassador, in 1892. 
"Owen Meredith" published, under that name, Clytemnestra in 1855, 
followed it with The Wanderer (1859), Lucile (i860), Songs of 
Servia (1861), Orval {\?>6oi), Chronicles and Characters (same date), 
Fables in Song (1874), Glenaveril (1888), After Paradise (1887),. 
while he had earlier collaborated with his friend Julian Fane in ^ 
poem on Tannhaicser ; and after his death two remarkable volumes 
of jiosthumous poems. Mar ah and King Poppy, appeared. In this 
large bulk of verse many lyrics of great, though seldom quite unflawed^ 
beauty are contained, the longer poems yield an abundance of inter- 
esting and not a few fine passages, and the author constantly displays 
command of two very excellent gifts — passion and satiric power. 
He had, however, a pair of drawbacks which sorely mar his work, 
and have sunk it in general estimation to an unfair degree — the first of 
them a strange tendency to imitate and echo even when he had ample 
notes of his own ; the second an utter inability to criticise, retrench, 
and correct. As Tennyson is of all poets that one who has used 
knife and file with most advantage, so Lord Lytton is he who has 
rejected their use with worse effect. 

There can, however, be no comparison in point of historical 
importance between any of these figures, or the imperfect schools and 
tendencies which they represent, and the group wliich arose a little 
later. In calling this group "Pre-Raphaelite," certain guards and 
provisos must be appended to the designation. There is no other 



CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 779 

term so convenient, or on the whole so appropriate ; but the Pre- 

Raphaelitism of poetry rather overlaps, or coincides with, than directly 

resembles the Pre-Raphaelitism of art. It is, however, a 

direct and legitimate development of the great Romantic Raphaeihes. 

revival in England. The chief notes of this third stage 

have been a generally, though not universally, mediaeval tone of 

thought, colour, and in part subject, with, in method, a still further 

elaboration of the two appeals to imagination — by the way of exact 

and vivid visual presentation and by that of subtle and varied musical 

suggestion of sound — which had been so largely carried out by 

Tennyson, and to some extent originated by Keats. 

These had had to educate themselves and their readers. Even 
Coleridge hesitated about Tennyson's prosody, even Wordsworth was 
uncertain about his fidelity to nature ; while, until a critical edition of 
his early work is presented, it cannot even yet, without 
great labour, be appreciated how much he had to do preparation, 
before he got his own style into perfection. But men 
who were born about 1830 or later found that style ready to their 
hand, they found its examples already brought to perfection, they 
found the public taste, if not fully yet partially, educated to it. 

So, too, even Tennyson, much more Scott and Coleridge and 
their generation, had entered only very partially into the treasures of 
MedijEval literature, and were hardly at all acquainted with those of 
Mediaeval art. Conybeare, Kemble, Thorpe, Madden were only in 
Tennyson's own time reviving the study of Old and Middle English. 
Early French and Early Italian were but just being opened up. 
Above all, the Oxford Movement directed attention to Medieval 
architecture, literature, thought, as had never been the case before 
in England, and as has never been the case at all in any other 
country. 

The eldest poets of the school were brother and sister, Dante 
Gabriel and Christina Georgina Rossetti. They belonged to England 
wholly by birth and education, but only partially by blood. Their 
father, Gabriel Rossetti, was an Italian refugee, a teacher -Qante and 
of his native language, a real though fanciful student of Christina 
literature, something of a poet himself, and a man of ossetti. 
sterling character. He married a Miss Polidori, who was English 
half by blood and wholly by associations. His eldest son, Gabriel 
Charles Dante, who rearranged his Christian names for public 
use, was born in 1828; his second daughter (the eldest, Maria 
Francesca, was also literary, as was the younger son, still alive, 
William Michael) in 1830. The life of neither was in the ordinary 
and outward sense eventful, and it was almost entirely spent in 
London by both. Dante, who was married to a lady of great beaut}'-, 



78o VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

Elizabeth Syddall, but lost her soon after marriage, died in 1882. 
His sister, who was all her life a fervent member of the Church of 
England, survived him, and died unmarried at the end of 1894. 

The main, or at least the professional, occupation of Dante 
Rossetti\s life was not poetry. He was educated at King's College 
School, but left it early to study drawing, and, young as he was, 
became one of the most enthusiastic members of the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood, which was at the middle of the century to convert 
England from conventional art. His own form of painting was, and 
remained, the most characteristic of all, never admitting reconciliation 
with convention, as did that of Millais, and in part of Mr. Holman 
Hunt, while it possessed far greater charm than that of any other. 
His drawing was always cavilled at ; as to the magnificence of his 
colour, no one with eyes could doubt. But these characteristics, and 
others which have the indefinableness of genius, found expression 
also in another art. Rossetti wrote verse very early ("The Blessed 
Damozel " itself dates in the first draught from boyhood), but the 
death of his wife in 1862 postponed for a time the publication of his 
original work. He had contributed, however, to the Pre-Raphaelite 
magazines, the Germ and the Oxford and Ca/nbridi^e Magazine, and 
had in 1861 publislied a volume of translations from early Italian 
poems, which displays part of the source, and still more of the nature, 
of his manner. His Poems appeared in 1870, with great acceptance 
from the competent, though with coarse and foolish abuse from 
others. He issued another volume of Ballads and Sonnets the year 
before his death, and the contents of the two, with alterations and 
additions, have been collected since. 

Although the earlier publication of work by his sister, and by his 
friends Mr. Morris and Mr. Swinburne, had made the manner of his 
work familiar to the public before it appeared, there can be little 
doubt that it was most original in his case. Naturally, he put more 
of the pictorial element into it than any of the others could do, and 
perhaps naturally also, he paid less attention than some of them to 
the direct aspect of things in nature. No similar professional 
explanation, however, can be found for tlie almost equally remarkable 
mastery of mere resonance, of mere verbal and literal music, which 
his verse displays ; and this must be set down partly to the tendency 
" in the air," partly to individual gift, and partly to the new instru- 
ment afforded by the stately varied harmony of English to a genius 
prepared ancestrally by the sweet, intense, but slightly monotonous 
melody of Italian. 

Like the work of most of the greater poets of this century, 
Rossetti' s is not very easily or profitably to be classified, save perhaps 
as regards his very remarkable sonnets, in mastery of which form he 



CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 781 

ranks with his sister and Wordsworth. It is possibly unfortunate, 
though in his case it was more than excusable, that he adopted the Pe- 
trarchian form, which is somewhat less suited to the genius of the 
English language, and not at all better suited to the genius of the 
sonnet, than the Shakespearian. But his excellence in it, like that of 
Milton and Wordsworth himself, justifies the indulgence. Of the two 
great divisions of the sonnet, the meditative and the pictorial, the 
latter, as we should expect from his double vocation, was his special 
forte. The " sonnets for pictures " of the first volume have never been 
excelled, if they have ever been equalled. But he was hardly inferior 
in the other — the great sonnet-sequence of "The House of Life" 
coming perhaps next after Shakespeare's as a sequence, while such 
single examples as '' Refusal of Aid between Nations," and the 
marvellous " Monochord," are supreme. 

Another group might be formed of his ballads — longer and almost 
miniature romances in form, like Rose Mary, The White Ship, and 
The King's Tragedy; or shorter, like Troy Towtt, Eden Bower, and 
Sister Helen. But the really important thing is to recognise in all 
these forms, from sonnet to ballad-romance, the imposing presence 
of a joint pictorial and musical appeal different from, and in parts 
intenser and stranger than, that of any other poet. He could also write 
things like The Burden of Nineveh and Jenny, very great poems of a 
simple cast in language and imager}-, direct, with hardly any display 
of gorgeous colour or intricate music, almost satirical in a sense. 

But he seldom developed this vein, and chiefly wrote in one of 
mystical Romanticism, melancholy in tone, but suffused with such 
sunset splendour of hue, and charged with such a burden of elfin 
music, as only the greatest things of Coleridge and Shelley, and perhaps 
Keats, had shown before. "The Blessed Damozel" sets the key-note 
of tone and colour, and it is maintained throughout to the "beryl- 
songs " of Rose Mary and the last revised sonnets of " The House of 
Life." The colour was richer, though the drawing was less exact, 
than Tennyson's ; the music, less perfect and less varied, had even 
more of half-articulate charm ; and the younger poet was prodigal of 
those appeals to passion and to mystery of which the elder's more 
Northern nature had been, though far indeed from incapable, yet 
somewhat chary, and more than somewhat shy. That the charm of 
Rossetti is a viorbidezza, a beauty touching on and partly caused by 
disease, is perhaps indisputable ; but it is still more indisputably 
beauty. The dreamy magnificence of " The Blessed Damozel," the 
soaring beat of " Love-Lily," the concentrated despair of " The Wood- 
spurge," the reality, as of a picture actually hanging on the wall, in 
" The Wine of Circe," the etherealised description of the dead Rose 
Mary, and scores of other things, stand, and probably ever will stand, 



782 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

as the furthest achievements of poetry in a certain direction. Only 
in a certain direction, of course, and leaving endless new paths open 
to the poet ; but final in that. 

The greatness of Miss Christina Rossetti's genius is best shown 
by the fact that while she naturally displayed a temper akin to her 
brother's, and for some time undoubtedly wrote to some extent under 
his inspiration, large parts, and some of the best parts, of her poetical 
accomplishment are quite distinct from anything of his. Nor is this 
distinction to be in the least sufficiently or reasonably accounted for 
by her sex, her piety, or any other conventional and obvious explana- 
tion. At points, of course, the brother and sister touch — they even 
overlap. The sonnet exercised its strong restraint, in the same 
Italian form, and with the same characteristics of colour, music, and 
meditation, on both : her sonnet-sequences are, with allowance for 
their different subjects, by no means unlike his. But her lyrics have 
a lighter, more bird-like, movement and voice than his stately 
descants ; she is less prone to an extreme regularity of metre, and 
her whole tone is often different. She began, as far as publication 
goes, with Goblm Market and Other Poems in 1861, followed it with 
another volume. The Prince's Progress, in 1866, and after a much 
longer interval with A Pageant and Other Poems in 1881. Later, 
her verse was collected more than once, and it was supplemented by 
a posthumous volume after her death. But a good deal of it remains 
in two books of devotion (partly in prose, of which she was an 
exquisite mistress, partly in verse), entitled Time Flies (1885), and 
The Face of the Deep (1892), wliich she issued in her later years. 

The poem in which, by order of publication and title, she 
announced herself. Goblin Market, though very pretty and almost 
beautiful, has too much of the deliberate and almost trivial fantas- 
ticality which Pre-RaphaeHtism at first borrowed from the earlier 
Romantic schools. But other things in the same volume, such as 
"Dreamland," "Winter Rain," "When I am dead, my Dearest," 
" The Three Enemies," and above all, " Sleep at Sea," are quite free 
from this objection, and gave an astonishingly true and new note 
of poetry, which was sustained, and indeed deepened, varied, and 
sweetened, till the beautiful lines " Heaven overarches sea and land," 
which are understood to be her last work, or at any rate composed 
within a very short time of her death. Her range was distinctly 
wide. She had, unlike Mrs. Browning, and perhaps unlike the 
majority of lier sex, a very distinct sense of humour ; she could sing, 
for music and in simple scheme, quite exquisitely ; her pathos has 
never been surpassed, except in the great single strokes of Shake- 
speare and a very few other Elizabethans. But her most characteristic 
strain is where this pathos blends with, or passes into, the utterance 



CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 783 

of religious awe, unstained and unweakened by any craven fear. The 
great devotional poets of the seventeenth century, Crashaw, Vaughan, 
Herbert, are more artificial than she is in their expression of this ; 
and hardly even their art, certainly not the art of the last-named, 
strikes out rarer poetic flashes and echoes than those that we find 
from " Sleep at Sea" to " Birds of Paradise." ^ 

In bulk of work, however, and in popular (which does not mean 
\'ulgar) charm no writer of the school who falls within our limits of 
discussion can approach Mr. William Morris. He was born in 
1834, the son of a wealthy merchant, and was educated . . . 

at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford. He did 
not take up any profession, though later he founded a famous shop 
or school of decorative art, which directly or indirectly helped to 
revolutionise the interior of English houses. It was in 1858 that 
the once neglected, but now famous, Defeiice of Gueneverc a7id Otlier 
Foeins appeared, a book almost as much the herald of the second 
school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson's early work was of the first. 
Nor did he, perhaps, ever surpass it in poetic note, though he improved 
very much upon it in some ways. As in Christina Rossetti's first 
book a little later, the quaintness was a little aggressive, and, unlike 
hers, the meditevalism was more aggressive and exclusive still. But 
the charm both of picture and music was astonishing, and after forty 
years "The Blue Closet," "The Wind," and other pieces remain 
alone, in a poetic country neighbouring and friendly to the domain 
of the Rossettis, but independent of it — a country lit with lunar rain- 
bows and ringing with fairy song. He had previously written both 
prose and verse in the above-mentioned Oxford and Cauibridge 
Magazine. Eight years later, in 1866, Mr. Morris addressed a larger 
public (for the Defence and its companions could perhaps never be 
enjoyed by any such) with a long poem, T/ie Life and Death of fason. 
The subject was sufficiently familiar, the tone, though still archaic, 
made less extensive demands on natural or acquired sympathy, and 
the piece was couched in rhymed heroics of a new-old pattern, very 
much enjambed or overlapped, which carries the reader along with a 
singular combination of smoothness and freedom from monotony, 
and which, being quite different from most of the metrical media 
recently in vogue, had the attraction of freshness. It secured at 
once a wider audience than any long narrative poem had had for 
many years, and in its turn prepared the public for the poet's next, 
and most ambitious, performance, which, all tilings considered, must, 
perhaps, be allowed to be his masterpiece. This was T/ie Earthly 
Paradise., which appeared in four volumes, the first two published 

^An early poem, but not printed till after her death. 



784 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book XI 

together, between 1868 and 1870. This great book consists of 
four-and-twenty narratives, twelve of Classical, twelve of Romantic 
origin, allotted in pairs to the twelve months, introduced by a 
singularly spirited narrative of adventure, and set in a frame of 
equal beauty. The metres varied, and the poet showed himself an 
equal master of the couplet just described, of the octosyllable, and 
of stanza-forms ; nor, perhaps, have any verse-tales since the very 
beginning of the century equalled in combined merit such pieces as 
'* The Lovers of Gudrun," the version of the Perseus story, '• The 
Ring given to Venus," and, indeed, the majority of the sections. 
'•Love is Enough" (1873) ^'^^^ ^^^^ interesting in subject, and, with 
charming passages, made metrical experiments not too happy ; while 
the poet's later versions of the ^Eneid and the Odyssey dissatisfied 
merely classical scholars without greatly pleasing those who can 
taste romance. But in 1877 he showed that his muse was not ex- 
hausted by a magnificent version of the legend of Sigurd the Volsung, 
clothed in a swinging anapaestic metre on which he had stamped his 
own individuality, and admirably suited to the subject. 

But, though even this by no means closed his issue of verse 
(for he afterwards published Poems by the Way (1891) and other 
volumes), the later years of his life were in preference given up to 
prose romance. He had early practised prose translation, rendering 
after his fashion, in company with a northern scholar, the Story of 
Grdtir the Strong (1869), The Volsiiuga Saga (1870), and other 
Icelandic work. And his own earliest published work in the Oxford 
and Cambridge Magazine had been an original romance. The 
Hollow Land, which he never reprinted. But in his last decade (he 
died in October 1896) he began a series of similar t\\\ng?>^ The House 
of the I'Volfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountains (1890), The 
Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood beyond the World 
(1894), The Well at the IPorld's End (1896), The IVater of the 
Wondrous isles (1897), The Sundering Flood (1898),^ in which the 
vague romantic charm of his earlier verse was revived with wonder- 
ful effect. In all his prose work he used a dialect which may be 
described as English prose of the fifteenth century, strongly dashed 
with Scandinavianisms — a dialect which, like Spenser's, offended 
pedants and purists as " no language," but which was exactly 
suited for his purpose. On the whole, there is perhaps no poet of 
the century, since Scott, who has given such a volume of Romantic 
pleasure to his readers as Mr. Morris, while there is also none who 
at his own best is his superior in individuality and poignancy of 
charm. But his range was not over-wide, and the very bulk of his 

1 Of this series the two first are the best as wholes; of the others, The Well at 
the World's End and The Sundering Flood contain the best passages. 



CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 785 



production prevented it from being always concentrated, or, to use 
an old but excellent j^hrase, "in beauty." 

The life of Arthur Edward O'Shaughnessy (184-I.-81) was short, 
and his period of poetical production was still shorter. In four 
years he published three volumes of most remarkable verse — The 
Epic of IVomeji (1870), Lays of France (1872), and 
Music and Moonlight (1874). But he did not follow *^',i\^sy^''" 
them up ; his professional work lay in the Natural 
History Department of the British Museum, and the posthumous Songs 
of a Worker contained little of his very best, much of it being transla- 
tion and paraphrase, as the Lays of France^ an adaptation of those 
of Marie, had been earlier. The tale of " Colibri," his only attempt 
at a poem of length, is too much tinged with the personal sorrow 
which beset his last years, and partakes too much of the unsubstantial 
remoteness of Shelley's Alastor, to be quite a success ; and these 
same characteristics, together with importunate obtrusion of creeds 
or disbeliefs of various kinds, mar the posthumous volume, which, 
however, contains some exquisite sonnets, and one or two lyrics, 
" Love, on your grave in the ground," '' When the Rose came, I loved 
the Rose," and others, in his best style. But this style is chiefly 
found in TJie Epic of Women and Micsic and Moonlight, and here 
O'Shaughnessy has a quality which is almost all his own, though he 
owes a very little in form to Poe, a little more in thought and feeling 
to the French poet Baudelaire, and perhaps a little also to George 
Darley. For strange and sweet music, " Exile," " A Neglected 
Heart," " Barcarolle," " The Fountain of Tears," the " ode " of 
Music and Moonlight, '" Once in a hundred years," " Has summer 
come without the rose?" and others stand quite by themselves. The 
late Mr. Palgrave, who discovered O'Shaughnessy in time to insert 
some of his work in the second series of the Golden Treasury, justly 
applied to them Sir Henry VVotton's famous phrase of ipsa inollities ; 
but they have more than mere softness, they have mystery and magic. 
It is possible that this anthology may at last extend the enjoyment of 
them beyond the few who have from the first tasted their charm. 

A not much longer life, even greater unhappiness (in this case 
it is to be feared by his own fault), and far more unfavourable 
external circumstances, were the lot of James Thomson the Second, 
who was born, the son of a sailor, at Port Glasgow in 1834, and died 
in London after breaking a blood-vessel in 1882. He was educated 
at the Caledonian Asylum, and became an army schoolmaster ; but 
was dismissed for insubordinate conduct, and after a wandering life 
for some time, turned journalist, and was this — as far as he had any 
regular occupation — till his death. Thomson's prose work which has 
been recovered is not inconsiderable, and displays undoubted ability 



786 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

of the critical kind, marred not merel_v by crude and violent views, 
and a sour rusticity of temper, but by the kind of half-knowledge, and 
the conventional priggishness, which are apt to beset self-educated men. 
His verse is very unequal, but at its best fully earns him a place here. 
Its capital expression in bulk is the almost famous City of Dreadful 
Night, which first appeared in a freethought newspaper, the National 
Reformer, in 1874. Just before his death this was published as the 
title-piece of a volume, and another. Vane's Story, followed, with post- 
humous pieces, later. He is in much need of selection, which would 
display his narrow and somewhat sinister, but intense, poetical quality, 
at present too much lost and diluted in a mass of inferior work. 

Although, among dead verse-writers who published about or after 
1850. there are not a few of interest, perhaps hardly one can pretend 
to a substantive place here. Coventry Patmore (1823-96). after being 
lo"g chiefly known by T/ie Angel in the House (1854 
onwards), a domestic love-history of great beauty in 
parts, but too fluent, and sometimes a little pathetic, gave stronger 
notes in the last twenty years of his life with The Unknown Eros 
(1877) and other things. Sir Francis Hastings Doyle (1810-88), 
Professor of Poetry at Oxford, with no very great range of poetical 
power, showed himself, when touching the "heroic lyre" in "The Red 
Thread of Honour," " The Private of the Buffs," and other pieces, 
the equal of Drayton and Campbell in their small and worthy class. 
Lord De Tabley (1835-95; better known, if known at all, in his 
earlier years as Mr. Leicester Warren, and writing under the name 
of W. P. Lancaster) came, like Patmore, to his own only in his last 
years with two volumes of Dramatic and Lyrical Poems (1893-95), 
but had in much earlier work shown poetic power far above the 
average. Those others in whose case entire omission might seem 
most unjust are perhaps Ebenezer Jones (1820-60), whose Studies 
of Sensatiofi a}td Event (1843) even -antedated the Spasmodic school 
generally, but is an outlier of it; William Johnson or Cor}', whose 
lonica has originality and classical charm ; Charles Stuart Calverley, 
whose parodies and whimsicalities generally are among the most 
amusing of the century, and possess that touch of scholarship which 
is more especially needed to save verse of this kind from vulgarity 
and to give it permanence; and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), 
a learned mathematician, but the property of literature in virtue of 
his delightful verse and prose medleys, all published as " by Lewis 
Carroll" — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1866), Through the 
Looking-Glass (1871), The Hunting of the Sna}-k (1876). etc. The 
rest must be silence. 



CHAPTER V 

MISCELLANEOUS 

J. S. Mill — Mansel — John Austin — Others — Newman — Borrow — Others — 
Science — Darwin — The Vestiges — Hugh Miller — Huxley 

The extension of literar)' treatment to subjects which had previously 
received little or nothing of it, on the one hand, and the contraction 
of literary effort in some where once it was busy and almost supreme, 
on the other, have been noted as characteristic of modern English 
writing. And both result, in the case of such a historical account as 
this, in the necessity of a sort of " pool " for the reception of handlings of 
new or old subjects which have scarcely attained, or have gradually lost, 
the proportions requiring separate treatment here. Philosophy and 
theology belong to the last category of inclusion, scholarship and 
physical science to the first, while the once all-important name of 
drama must have been included, if it had not seemed better to give 
it no grouped treatment, and simply to mention the rather rare 
examples of it which have literary interest with the other work of 
their writers. 

In philosophical writing of the wide and "applied" kind there 
have been five writers who dominate the second third of the century, 
while two of them lived nearly to its close — the younger Mill, his 
opponent Dean Mansel, Austin, Maine, and Stephen. 

John Stuart Mill, the son of James, was born in London on 12th 
May 1806, educated according to his father's unnatural fads, and 
early introduced by him into the East India House. But official 
duties were to him merely a profitable avocation : his 
vocation was entirely philosophic and literary. He was 
for some time editor of the London and Westminster lievieiu, and 
his purely literary work in essay is not despicable ; but logic, ethics, 
and political discussion in the philosophical succession of Locke and 
Hume, with a strong dash of French positivism, were what attracted 
him most. In 1843 h^ published his celebrated System of Logic, 
Ratiocinative (the substitution for Deductive is important) and Induc- 

787 



788 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

tive ; in 1848 his scarcely less celebrated Political Economy — a new 
outlier of philosophy which, from the time of its English father 
Adam Smith downwards, has contributed much more than a respect- 
able share of English philosophy which is literature. He entered 
Parliament in 1865, and was a conspicuous though amiable failure 
there, was turned out in 1868, and died five years later at Avignon. 
He had always lived much in France, where he was partly educated, 
and there was a certain French strain, as well as a feminine one, in 
his style and thought. His minor works, some of them not so very 
minor, were Liberty (1859), Dissertations and Discussions (1859- 
75), Utilitarianism (1863), a book on Covite (1865), an elabo- 
rate Examination of Sir inilia/u Hamilton's FJiilosophy (1865; 
much of this was an excited polemic against the religious philos- 
ophy of Hamilton's disciple Mansel), The Subjection of Women 
(1869), and posthumously, an interesting Autobiography (1873-74). 
With MilPs philosophical peculiarities we are hardly here concerned, 
more than to say that he was a rigid sensationalist in psychology, 
and in political economy and politics proper a believer in 
" Liberty," almost to the full anarchic impossibilities of Godwin, a 
Utilitarian in ethics, and an " Associationist " everywhere. His 
literary exposition of these tenets deserves all but the highest- praise, 
and with a more inspiring creed would probably have merited the 
highest, being clear without shallowness, popular without vulgarit)', 
and precise without any indulgence of that extravagantly technical 
jargon which has put so much recent philosophy out of court with 
literary judgment. 

The opponent just mentioned, Henry Longueville Mansel (1820- 
71), a much younger man than Mill, died before him, and wrote 
very much less, while his subjects were, almost exclusively, not the 
exoteric and popular, but the esoteric and technical 
departments of philosophy. Yet he was as little of a 
"jargonist" as Mill himself, a far closer and deeper thinker, and the 
master of a style which, in his few excursions to the matter of the 
general reader, became literary in the finest sense, while even in his 
more abstract writings it has the most admirable quality. He re- 
ceived his education at Merchant Taylors' School and St. John's 
College at Oxford, became a Fellow of this latter, Bampton Lecturer, 
and first Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy 
in the University. He was long the leader of the Tory party in 
Oxford, and was made Dean of St. Paul's in 1868, but held the post 
only a short time, dying suddenly in 1871. His bookwork is not 
large: a volume of Bampton Lectures (1857), which were violently 
attacked by freethinkers and others for their so-called Occamism (or 
Occamism turned upside down) on the relations of the Deity to the 



MISCELLANEOUS 789 



moral standard, but which stand almost alone as examples of really 
philosophical theology in our time ; a dissertation on Metaphysics 
(i860) ; and Prolegomena Logica (185 1), his chief original contri- 
bution to philosophy ; besides some not individually bulky Lectures, 
Letters, etc. It is said that he cannot be found in German 
dictionaries of philosophy, which would seem to be so much the 
worse for those repositories of learning. After his death a volume, 
interesting but very partially representative of his powers, was pub- 
lished, containing a reprint of an extraordinarily brilliant University 
" skit '' in verse called Phrontisterion, and some Quarterly essays ; 
with another volume on The Gnostic Heresies (1875). As a man of 
letters he may be more than content with the exact and generous 
encomium of Mr. Pater (a critic as competent in the particular matter 
as alien from the Dean in general tone of thought and choice of 
subjects) that Mansel's works "illustrate the literary beauty that 
there may be in conciseness, and with obvious repression or economy 
of a tine rhetorical gift." And it is scarcely necessary to say that 
such rhetorical gift (which has not been scanty) as has existed in our 
century has too often not been repressed or economised. 

Austin, Maine, and Stephen earned their chief reputation by 
devoting themselves to the philosophic handling of law — a subject 
which Bentham has at least the credit of rescuing from the mere 
" text-and-margent " dealing of too many early English 

•^ A .• / ON 17 John Austin. 

writers on it. Austin (1790-1859) was a man old 
enough to have appeared in the previous Book, and his gi'eat work, 
The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, appeared as early as 
1831. But his lectures were not published till after his death. 
More philosophical and more literary than Bentham, Austin had a 
harder and stronger intellect than Mill's, and is perhaps, on the 
whole, the greatest product of Utilitarianism. His clearness is partly 
the result of — is certainly accompanied by — limitations ; and like 
all his school he has a not quite intelligent intolerance of the inex- 
plicable. But he was a great mental gymnast and gymnasiarch, 
and his style agrees with his gifts. 

Maine and Stephen, a younger pair, belong distinctly to the later 
half of the century. Both depended very much, though by no means 
in matter of direct pupilage, on Austin, and both exhibit philosoi^hy 
as it busies itself chiefly with politics or the political 

TT T o i>x- 1 •o Others. 

sciences. Henry James Sumner Maine, born in 1822, 
was educated at Christ's Hospital and at Pembroke College, Cam- 
bridge, whence he passed to Trinity Hall, of which he became at 
first Fellow and afterwards Master from 1877 till his death in 1888. 
He was made Professor of Civil Law at five-and-twenty. and soon 
after Reader at Lincohvs Inn; in 1862 he became Legal Member 



790 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

of Council in India. He returned to a place in the Indian Council 
at home, and to the Professorship of Jurisprudence at Oxford. He 
was a rather copious contributor to the newspaper press, but his 
connection with literature depends mainly on four works of great 
importance and admirable style — Ancient Law, his masterpiece 
(1861), Village Communities (1871), Early Law and Custom (1883), 
and Popular Government (1885). 

His successor on the Indian Council, Sir James Fitzjames 
Stephen, was seven years younger, and survived Maine rather less than 
the same term. He was son of another Sir James Stephen, a very 
considerable person of his day as an Edinburgh reviewer, an official 
in the Colonial Office, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, 
and author of divers books, the chief being Essays in Ecclesiastical 
History. The younger Sir James was called to the Bar in 1854, 
and died, shortly after resigning a judgeship, forty years later. He 
was at Eton for a time, then at King's College, London, and finished 
his education at Trinity College, Cambridge. His main subject Avas 
that of his profession, and his treatise on the Criminal Law is a 
standard book, but he wrote much in theology, in which his thought 
inclined to the negative; history, Indian and other; and miscellaneous 
literature. His best literary mark, both in thought and style, was 
perhaps made in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (1873). 

Theology itself has contributed even less than philosophy to the 
permanent literary production of the century, and most of what it 
has given of this kind is due to the Oxford Movement. This not 
merely produced the massive scholarship and striking, if rugged, 
style of its great and never lost leader Pusey (1806-82), the 
exquisite Christian verse of Keble (1792- 1866), the admirable 
literary balance and precision of Dean Church (1815-90), but 
was responsible, as matter of reaction and revulsion, besides the 
already mentioned Froude, for the strange, unattractive, but intensely 
characteristic work of Mark Pattison (1813-89), Fellow and latterly 
Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, who inadequately represented 
his great learning in humanist and Renaissance literature by studies 
oi Casaubon (1875) and Scaliger, wrote a great little book on Milton 
(1879), contributed to the once famous Essays and Rcvicivs (i860), 
and left an autobiography showing with admirable literary finisli, but 
with somewhat hideous veracity, the trials of a wounded soul, incapa- 
ble of earthly medication and rejecting heavenly. 

But the literary glory of the last two-thirds of the century in 
English theology was the other, the lost leader of the Tractarian 
movement, John Henry Newman, wlio is ranked by some with, and 
by most competent judges not far below, the greatest masters of 
English prose, and who had no small skill in verse, as is shown by 



MISCELLANEOUS 791 



the Dream of Gerontiiis and many hymns and poems, of which the 
chief is the famous " Lead, Kindly Light." Newman was born in the 
vear 1801, and in London, of an East-Angrlian family. 

'^ , , -11, ^ ■ ■ Newman. 

He was educated at a private school, and went to Trinity 
College, Oxford, early. He was not at first very successful, but 
obtained an Oriel Fellowship in 1823, whereby, at the age of five- 
and-twenty, he became Vicar of St. Mary's, the University church, an 
appointment of no pecuniary value, but as a vantage-point the equal 
at least of any cure in England. For some twenty years Newman 
delivered from this pulpit sermons unlike anything else of their kind ; 
and he also took all but, or altogether, the greatest part, certainly 
the greatest literary part, in the polemic of the Oxford Movement. 
His journey to the Mediterranean in 1832-33, and his resignation of 
St. Mary's shortly before he left the Church of England, were the 
most important events in his career, which lasted longer after this 
event than before it. He wrote much during his nearly fifty years 
of connection with the Roman Church, in which he rose to be Cardinal, 
but, except the Apologia of 1864, in which he eagerly availed himself 
of Kingsley's awkward attack, not much of the first importance. He 
died nth August 1890. 

Newman's work is exceedingly voluminous, and hardly even the 
briefest analysis of it can be attempted here. The Plain and Paro- 
chial Sermons and the Apologia would suffice for an appreciation of 
his style, though nothing that he wrote in prose or verse can be called 
superfluous. In the main he is a representative of that perfected 
plain Georgian style which has been more than once indicated as 
the best, for all purposes in English. It is in him refined still further 
by an extra dose of classical and academic correctness, flavoured 
with quaint though never over-mannered turns of phrase, and shot in 
every direction with a quintessential individuality, rarely attempting 
(though never failing when it does attempt) the purely rhetorical, but 
instinct with a strange quiver of religious and poetical spirit. 

The theological school formally opposed to Tractarianism was 
not distinguished by literary merit ; but it so happens that one of the 
most remarkable literary figures of the century, and one v;ho as in 
the strictest sense miscellaneous and nondescript, has the best right 
here, was violently anti-Tractarian, and indeed wrote one of his few 
books, and great part of another, almost directly against it. This 
was George Borrow, a novelist, whose novels are, in 
fact, little or nothing more than very imaginative auto- 
biographies — which description might also be given to almost the 
whole of his work. Borrow, the son of an officer in the army, was 
born in Norfolk in 1803, and died in the same county in 1881. 
After some curious experiences in quest of literary work, he became 



792 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

an agent of the Bible Societ}^, and travelled much in Spain in the 
exciting early days of the reign of Queen Isabel II. These travels 
supplied him with the materials of his two first books — The Gipsies 
in Spain (1840) and The Bible in Spain (1843), the latter one of 
the most brilliant and original books of travel ever written. In 
Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857) he wove his earlier 
adventures in England itself, and especially his knowledge of gipsy 
life, with many other strands, of which the above-named anti-Pusey- 
ism was the chief, into a singular fabric, very delightful at its best to 
those who can taste it ; while the later Wild Wales is again avowed 
travel. These are all his published original books; but he also wrote 
a vast mass of translation, philological work, etc., only a very small 
part of which ever got into print. Borrow w^as one of the most 
unreasonable of men, and the eccentricity of his genius no doubt had 
something of affectation in it. But it was genius at least as undoubted 
as that of any one mentioned in this chapter, and the flavour of his 
manner and style is as intense as it is unique. 

Close to most of the names mentioned in this chapter, and in 
others of this Book, come yet other names which may seem to demand 
association with them: Jowett by Pattison ; Professors T. H. Green 
and Wallace among the philosophers ; Seeley among the 
historians; Walter Bagehot (1826-77) "^ va2iX\ of singular 
intelligence both in literature and politics; John Forster (1812-76) 
— a bumptious person, but a useful scholar — and Dr. John Brown 
(1810-82), the most Goldsmithian of recent writers, among the 
essayists; Richard Jefferies (1848-87), the greatest minute describer 
of English country life since White of Selborne, either by himself or 
with the '' pictorials " like Ruskin and Pater. But we must pass them 
by, as less eminent and representative than others, and end with a few 
specialists in branches less literary as a rule. 

The production of physical science, as might be expected, has 
been very large, but from the increase of technical and specialist 
character seldom literary. Yet it has enlisted some persons of real 
literary talent, and one or two of something not unlike 
genius. The most important of these beyond all question 
were Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, to whom, as an example of 
popular science, we may add Hugh Miller. 

Charles Robert Darwin, grandson of the author of the Botanic 
Garden, was born at Shrewsbury in 1809, and educated there, at 
Edinburgh, and at Christ's College, Caml^ridge. One of the chances 
. which only come to men at once great and fortunate, 
but of which only men at once great and fortunate take 
full advantage, made him naturalist to H.M.S. Beagle, during her 
scientific cruise to the South Seas between 1831 and 1836, under 



MISCELLANEOUS 793 



the command of Captain, afterwards Admiral, Fitzro}'. On liis return 
home, having considerable means and no need of a profession, he 
gave himself up entirely to experiment, thought, and literary exposi- 
tion of his views in regard to biology, especially in regard to the 
famous theories of Selection and Evolution with which his name is 
connected. The Origin of Species, his most famous book, appeared 
in 1859, and was followed by others. On such views historical 
literary criticism has no opinions : it looks at their authors, from 
Heraclitus to Darwin, with an equal eye, knowing that they dawn, and 
charm, and irritate, and pall, and pass away, retaining little but 
historical interest in themselves, unless they happen to have sought 
and obtained the aid of literature itself in their expression. Darwin 
seems to have sought little, but he obtained something — an absolute 
clearness, a kind of competency and sufficiency for his own needs, 
which can never pass unnoticed, and with them an intimation of 
literary power in reserve, which could have been displayed if occasion 
had served. 

A less scientific, but more definitely literary, anticipation of the 
Evolution theory, the Vestiges of Creation, which continued to be 
anonymous for some time, but was known to be the work of Robert 
Chambers, a well-known Edinburgh publisher, had 

' . o J 1 1 u J u The Vestiges. 

appeared in 1844, and had been opposed by many, 
including an interesting self-made man of science and letters, Hugh 
Miller of Cromarty, who, born seven years before Darwin, began life 
as a stone-mason, became a journalist, and died by his 
own hand in 1856. His Old Red Sandstone (1841)' "^ 
unites scientific value with popular appeal and literary merit in a 
very unusual way, and almost as much may be said of the rest of his 
numerous writings (especially Afy Schools and ScJtoohnasters, 1852), 
where their matter admits of really literary treatment. There can be 
nothing more hopelessly unliterary than to undervalue Hugh Miller. 

But the greatest man of science from tlie point of view of literature 
during the century — a man who must have been remarkable in any 
literary prose exercise to which he had given himself, and of whose 
performances it can only be regretted that they too often ^^ , 

, , , Huxlcv* 

had the two most ephemeral of subjects — physical science 
and anti-theological polemic — for their themes, was Thomas Henry 
Huxley, born at Ealing in 1825. He entered the navy as a doctor, 
and visited the South Seas, but he did not find the Admiralty sym- 
pathetic, and left the service, though he held many public appoint- 
ments later. His strictly scientific work was of a more special 
character than Darwin's. But he used his considerable culture and 
his undoubted literary genius in a copious and rather too aggressive 
abundance of lectures, reviews, essays, biographies, mostly defending 



794 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi 

science by assuming the offensive, but always curiously alive, full of 
inspiration from the very sources — jjure philosophy, pure theology, 
pure literature — which he would have had men leave for others, and 
displaying a vivid and forcible style, only deficient in the one grace 
of urbanity. If the good points of Huxley and those of Matthew 
Arnold could have been combined, and their weak points eliminated, 
the best literary manner of the nineteenth century, and one 'of the 
best of all times, would have resulted. 

Even shorter and more eclectic notice must suffice for the more 
noticeable names of the department between science and literature, 
that of philological study in ancient and modern languages, which 
does not disregard literature altogether. This combination has been 
too much forgotten, yet some names of those who have not forgotten it 
emerge. The revived interest in old English literature as literature 
bore its fruit also in the study of English language, and of all the formal 
parts of English rhetoric and poetry. Some linguistic scholars have 
been noted above, as has the most important in the other class, the 
author of the one important book which exists on English Prosody, 
Dr. Edwin Guest. 

In the classics themselves not a little good work has been done. 
The most accomplished scholar, in the strict technical modern sense, 
who did not let slip his grasp of literature, was jDrobably H. A. J. 
Munro of Cambridge, who produced an epoch-making edition of 
Lucretius ; the most literary exponents and professors of classical 
literature, who were also scholars, John Conington of Oxford and 
W. Y. Sellar of Edinburgh, the former famous for his edition of 
Virgil, the latter for his series of books on the Roman Poets of the 
Republic and the Early Empire. But the W'Ork of scholars in this 
kind must always be more ministerial than creative. They efface 
themselves in introducing others. 



CONCLUSION 

The peculiarities of the period immediately noticed in the preced- 
ing Book resemble those of the earlier part of the century in defying 
single or simple characterisation. Owing partly to the wide expatia- 
tion of literature in respect of subject, partly to the increasing rejec- 
tion of narrow or identical regulations as to form, the product is — at 
any rate when seen so close — a little chaotic; and it would be a 
proof rather of rashness than of prescience to undertake to say how 
the firm perspective of the past will represent it to the future. 

Something, however, we can see and say. In poetry, that 
reliance on the combined appeal of poetic expression to eye and 
ear by extremely elaborate and vivid description and colouring, by 
cunningly adjusted symphony of letter and syllable, which in the first 
half disengaged itself from the turmoil of the Romantic revolt, has 
been more and more the special method of the second ; and though 
the Pre-Raphaelite school, which expressed this most fully, is probably 
past its prime, no other has really taken its place, and no poet of 
anything Uke commanding originality has appeared for many years. 
New singers are more and more echoes — sometimes direct, sometimes 
blended. We have our Crashaw and our Akenside ; we have even 
resurrections of voices so recent, and themselves so little perfected, as 
those of the Spasmodics. But there is no sign yet of a Tennyson or 
a Browning, even of a Morris or a Rossetti. Meanwhile, Tennyson 
himself has given to the century an example of a poet permitted by 
fortune to develop himself, using the permission as perhaps only 
two poets before him (Chaucer and Dryden) had done, and leaving 
a life-work which, if it come short of Chaucer in originality and 
freshness, of Dryden in strength, possesses its own superiorities over 
both. And Browning has left us a figure unique, interesting in its 
very fault.s, Wordsworthian in the difference between its best poetry 
and its worst, and at the opposite pole from Wordsworth's in its 
restless energy and all-attempting variations. 

In the matter of prose, the still further development of the novel, 
and in the wide sense of the essay, has been the main feature ; but 

795 



796 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book 

the form of prose, not a little affected by this very fact, has given us a 
somewhat more definite phenomenon — one fit to be classed with the 
greater phases of style during the history itself as a whole. The 
revolt from plainness which has been sketched in connection with the 
names of Landor in one direction, of De Ouiucey and Wilson in 
another, of Carlyle in a third, has never exactly subsided, even into a 
Provisional Constitution. But it has passed through at least two 
well-marked phases, corresponding to the second and last thirds of 
the century respectively. In the middle period, though prose of the 
very greatest was produced by Carlyle himself in the more revolu- 
tionary, by Newman in the more academic varieties, and by Fronde 
in a style between them, the general tendency of writing was to a 
looseness and slipshodness, not indeed quite reaching the state 
of things which has been noticed at the end of the seventeenth 
century, but, in the different circumstances, not wholly dissimilar. 
Then, between i860 and 1870, but not much before the later date, 
there set in a reaction, not towards a plain style, but towards a sort 
of New Euphuism, very punctilious of detail, elaborately yellow- 
stockinged and cross-gartered, tremljlingly alive to the least shadow 
of the obvious, irrevocably determined that none of its guests should 
take down to the banquet of words a partner in whose company it 
had ever found itself before. Sparely practised at first, this manner 
became common about the end of the eiglities, and since the death of 
two of the chief practitioners, Mr. Pater and Mr. Stevenson (who 
raised it from a mannerism into a style), it has been held rather 
disgraceful not to follow it. Meanwhile it is quite the most distinct 
literary feature of the last quarter of the century, and one of the few 
such features which the century itself presents, comparable to those of 
the centuries before it. 

As we survey these centuries at the end of the strange Herculean 
task of sketching the literature of a thousand years in less than as 
many pages, we need attempt no Pisgah-sight forward. But the 
route behind us is, it may be hoped, fairly clear. All those who 
possess or claim the right to be guides in the journey will not 
agree with this particular road-book ; there must be differences on 
small points, and there may be differences, not unwarranted, 
even on some great ones. But, as it has been less the object to 
air crotchets than to write with what has been called a ''reasoned 
orthodoxy," or with heresies repressed except where honour and 
conscience require protest, such differences may perhaps be made 
matter of agreement, of compromise, at least of suspended discussion. 
Those who — and this is the main purpose of the volume — use it to 
supply the necessary minutiae of useful information in guiding them- 



CONCLUSION 797 



selves or others through the history of which it is a mere epitome, 
may often find the opinions here expressed differing from other 
things that have been written about the books ; but they will, it is 
hoped, less often find difference with the books themselves. It is 
these books, and not the theories about them or the gossip about 
their authors, to which I have striven here to serve as usher, to make 
access to them a little easier, comprehension of them in the initial 
stages a little less arduous. To "do justice," in the common phrase, 
to such a theme is impossible ; the biggest book in the language, 
and the greatest genius among its writers, could hardly do that to 
English Literature. But even by as much as this is impossible, by 
so much is it the more to be wished that every one should be helped 
and encouraged to acquaint himself in his measure with the subject 
— to gain some knowledge, as far as concerns his own nation and 
language, of the grace and the glory of the written word that conquers 
Time. 



INDEX 



%* In order not unduly to swell this index, entries are confined to those passages 
which contain substantive reference to, and not mere citation of, the persons, 
books, or matters indicated. The dates here have been adjusted to those in 
The Dictionary of National Biograph)', so far as that useful publication has 
appeared. Variation in the text is not accidental, but kept to show that 
authorities disagree. When it extends to one year only, the difference be- 
tweeti new and old style, as to the beginning of the year, will often account 
for it. 



ABBE y WALK, The, 185 
ABC, Chaucer's, 122 
Absalom and Achitophel, 474 sq. 
Abuses Stript and Whipt, 362 
Adam Bede, 752 
Adam Blair, 688 
"Adam FitzAdam," 621 
Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), 533-9 
Adonais, 676 
Adventurer, The, 620 
Adventures of a Guinea, The, 609 
Adventures of an Atom, 605 
Aeneid, Douglas's, 188, 191-2 

Phaer's, 251 

Stanyhuist's, 251 note 
Affectionate Shepherd, The, 276 
Against the Scots, 169 
Aglaura, 436 
Ainsworth, William Harrison (1805-82), 

685 
Aitken, Mr. J. A., 534 note, 546 note 
Akenside, Mark (1721-70), 579-80 
Alastor, 670 
Alba, 2^8 

Albertus Wallenstein , 438 
Albion and Albanius, 505 note 
Albion's England, 275 
Alboin, 2 

Alchemist, The, 334 
Alcibiades, 500 
Alcilia, 278 
Alciphron, 545 

Alexander, Sir William. See Stirling 
Alexander and Dindimus, 28 note 



Alfred, King (849-901), works of, 21-25, 

28 note 
Alfred, Proverbs of 59 
Alice in Wonderland, 786 
Alisaunder, King, 89 
Alison, 66 sq. 
Allegro, L', 394 
All for Love, 497-8 
Alliteration, 3, 12, 36, 45, 102 sq. 
Alma, 557 

Almoran and Hamet, 609 
Alton Locke, 754 
Amelia, 602 sq. 
Amis and Amiloun, 99 
Amoretti, Spenser's, 268 
Amory, Thomas (1691 7-1788), 609 
Amusements, Serious and Comical, 526 
Analogy, Butler's, 542 
Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 378-80 
Anatomy of the World, The, 367 
Ancient Mariner, The Rime of the, 

653 -f^- 
Ancren Riwle, The, 53, 69, 143 
Andreas, St., 14 
Andrevves, Bishop Lancelot (1555-1626), 

383-4 
Andromeda, Kingsley's, 753-4 
Andromeda Liberata, 356 
Angel in the House, The, 786 
Anima Poetae, 654 note 
Annual Register, The, 628 
Annus Mirabilis, 474 
Anstey, Christopher (1724-1805), 596 
Anti-Jacobin, The, 596 and note 



799 



8oo 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Antiquary, The (play), 438; (novel), 
679 sq. 

Antonio and Mellida, 343 

Antony and _ Cleopatra, 325 

Apollonius of Tyre, 28 note 

Apollyonisis, The, 360 

Apology for Poetrie, 233 

Appius and I'irginia, " R. B.'s," 231 
Webster's, 346 

Appleton House, 426, 564 

Arbuthnot, John (1667-1735), 541 

Arcades, the, 394 

Arcadia, The, 264 

Arden of Feversham, 329 

Arcopagitica, 447-8 

" Areopagus," the Leicester House, 260 

Argument against Abolishing Christi- 
anity, 531 

Armstrong, John (1709-79), 579 

Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), 766-9, 
774-6 

Arnold, Thomas (1795-1842), 710 

Arraignment of Paris, 284, 289 

Ars Sciendi Mori, 162 

Arthour and Merlin, 90 

Arthur, King, and the Arthurian Le- 1 
gend, 42 sq. \ 

Art of Preservittg Health, ^ji) '■ 

Ascham, Roger (1515-68), 237-41, 295 j 

Ashby, George (15th cent.), 165 

Astrcea, 354 

Astra-a Ix'cdux, 473 

Astrolabe, Treatise of the, 144-5 

Astrophel and Stella, 262 

As You Like It, 325 

Atheists Tragedy, The, 349 

Athenian Mercury, etc., 527 and tiote 

Atterbury, Francis (1662-1732), 541-2 

Attila, 2 

Aubrey, John (1624-97), 5^3 

Auchinleck MS., the, 84 note 

Audelay, )ohn (I4th-I5th cent.), 163 

Augustine, St., Soliloquies of, 21 note 

Aurcngzebc, 474, 498 

Aurora Leigh, 737 

Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 681-3 

Austin, John (1790-1859), 789 

Authoiised Version, the, 380-1 

Autobiography, Gibbon's, 626 

Avisa, Willoughby's, 277 

Awntyrs of Arthur, The, 105 

Aycnbitc of Iniuyf, The, 69 



Ayton, Sir Robert (1570-1638), 461-2 
Aytoun, William Edmonstoune (1813- 
65). 739 

BACON, Francis (1561-1626), 369-7^ 
Bage, Robert (1728-1801), 612 
Bagehot, Walter (1826-77), 79^ 
Baillie, Joanna (1762-1851), 641 
Bale, Bishop John (1495-1563), 227 and 

note 
Ballades, Cinquante, 138 note 
Ballad of Good Counsel, 182 
Ballads, Tennyson's (1880), 732 
Ballads, the, 200-204, 431, 580 
Bampton Lectures (Mansel's), 788 
Barbour, John (1316 ?-95), 171-3 
Bar Chester Tomer s, 751 
Barclay, Alexander (1475 ?-i552), 166-7 
Barham, Richard Harris (1788-1845), 

739 
Barnard, Lady Anne (1750-1825), 593-4 
Barnes, Barnabe (1569-1609), 277 
Barnes, William (1800-86), 719-20 
Barnfield, Richard (1574-1627), 276 
Barons' Wars, The, 352 
Barrow, Isaac (1630-77), 444-5 
Barry Cornwall. See Procter, B. W. 
Bartholometo Fair, 335 
Barton, Bernard (1784-1849), 716 
Basse, William ( ?-i653 ?), 362-3 

Battle of Alcazar, 289 
Battle of Maldon, The, 17 
Battle of the Books, The, 530 
Baxter, Richard (1615-91), 445 
Bayly, Thomas Haynes (i797-i839),7i7 
Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli, Vis- 
count (1804-81), 685-6 
Beattie, James (1735-1803), 585-6 
Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616), and 

Fletcher, John (1575-1625), 336-40 
Beaumont, Sir John (1583-1627), 355 
Beaumont, Joseph (1616-99), 4^9 
Beaux-Stratagem, The, 495 
Beckford, William (1759-1844), 610-11 
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803-49), 

722-3 
Bede, Alfred's, 24 

Bede, the Venerable (673-735), 11, 24 
Bee, The, 618 

Beggar's Opera, The, 505 note, 559 sq. 
Behn, Afra (1640-89), 480-1, 489, 517 
Bellamira, 489 



INDEX 



8oi 



Bells and Pomegranates, 733 

Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832), 712 

Bentley, Richard (1662-1742), 540 

Beowulf, 3-7, 8, 10 

Beppo, 667 

Berkeley, Bishop George (1685-1753), 

544-6 
Berners, John Bourchier, Lord (1467- 

1533). 198-9 
Beiyn, Tale of, 118 
Bestiary, the M. E, 57, 58 
Bevis of Hampton, 94 
Biograplua Literaria, 654 sq. 
Blackmore, Sir Richard (1650 ?-i729), 

555 
Blackstone, Sir William (1723-80), 632 
Blackiuood's Magazine, 695 sq. 
Blair, Hugh (1718-1800), 581 note, 650 

yiote 
Blair, Robert (1699-1746), 572 
Blake, William (1757-1827), 591-2 
Bloomfield, Robert (1766-1823), 717 
Bliidy Serk, The, 185 
Boadicea, 588-90 
Boctktus, Alfred's, 21-23 

Chaucer's, 144 
Boileau, 153 

Bokenam, Osbern (15th cent.). 162-3 
Bold Stroke for a Wife, A, 496 
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount 

(i678-i75i),542 
Bon Gaultier Ballads, The, 739 
Book of Snobs, The, 744 
Book of the Duchess, The, 122 
Book of the Hoiolat, ij^ 
Boirow, George (1803-81), 791 
Bosuell, James (1740-95), 648 
Bosworth Field, 355 
Botanic Garden, The, 597 
Bouge of Court, The, 169 
Bourchier, John. Sec Lord Berners 
Bowlby Cliff, 4 note 
Bowles, William (1762-1850), 595 
Boyle, Robert (1627-91), 522-3 
Bradshaw, Mr. H., 118 
Braithwaite, Richard (1588 7-1673), 

355-6 
Breton, Nicholas (1545-1626), 355 
Britain's Ida, 267, 337, 358 
Britannia's Pastorals, 361 
Broken Heart, The, 433 
Brome, Alexander (1620-66), 428 

3F 



Brome, Richard ( 7-1652 ?), 437 

Bronte, Anne (1820-49), 747-8 
Bronte, Charlotte (1816-55), 747-9 
Bronte, Emily (1818-48), 747-8 
Brooke, Henry (1703-83), 610 
Brooke, Lord. See Greville, F. 
Brooke, Mr. Stopford, i note, 16, 657 

note 
Brougham, Henry, Lord (1778-1868), 

693 
Brown, Tom (1663-1704), 526-7, 600 
Browne, Isaac Hawkins (1705-60), 596 

7tote 
Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-82), 449-52 
Browne, William (1591-1643), 360-1 
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-61), 

736-8 
Browning, Robert (1812-89), 637, 733-6 
Bruce, Michael (1746-67), 594 
Brunanburgh Poem, The, 17 
Brus, The, 172-3 
Brut, Layamon's, 48 sq. 
Buchanan, George (1506-1582), 465 
Buckhurst, Lord. Sec Sackville 
Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821-62), 

763-4 
Bulwer. See Lytton 
Bunyan, John (1628-88), 81, 136 note, 

165. 513-17 
Burgh, Benedict and Thomas (15th 

cent.), 163 
Burke, Edmund (1729-97), 628-31 
Burnet, Gilbert (1643-1715), 523 
Burnet, Thomas (1635 7-1715), 517-18 
Burney, Frances (1752-1840), 612 
Burning Babe, The, 276 
Burns, Robert (1759-96), 592-5 
Burton, Robert (1577-1640), 377-80 
Bury Fair, 337, 488 
Busybody, The, 496 

Butler, Bishop Joseph (1692-1752), 543 
Butler, Samuel (1612-80), 170,477-9 
Byrhtnoth, The Death of, 17 
Byrom, John (1692-1763), 577 
Byron, George Gordon Byron, Lord 

(1788-1824), 666-9 

CADENUS AND VANESSA, 530 

Casdmon, 10, 11 sq., 24 

Caleb Williams, 634 

Calendar, The Shepherd's, 266-7 

Caligula, 499 



802 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Calisfo, 499 

Calverley, Charles Stuart (1831-84), 786 

Cambyscs, 231 

Camden, William (1551-1623), 301 

Campaign, The, 536 

Campbell, Thomas (1777-1844), 258, 
430, 675-6 

Campden, Hugh (15th cent.), 163 

Campion, Thomas ( ?-i6i9), 272, 

277 note, 357-8 

Canning, George (1770-1827), 596 and 
note 

Canterbury Tales, The, lorj sq. 

Capell, Edward (1713-81), his Prolu- 
sions, 201, 354 note 

Capgrave, John (1393-1464), 208 

Carew, Thomas (1598 ?-i639 ?), 419-21 

Carey, Henry ( ?-i743). 55^ 

Carey, Patrick {c. 1651), 425 

Carlyle, Thomas (1795-188 1), 705-6, 
758-62 

Caroline poetry, character and distribu- 
tion of, 391 sq. 

Carols, 202 sq. 

" Carroll, Lewis." See Dodgson 

Cartwright, William (1611-43), 422, 438 

Cary, Henry (1772-1844), 717 

Castara, 422 

Castaway, The, 588-9 

Castle of Indolence, The, 571 

Castle of Love, The, Berners's, 198 
Grost6te's, 72, 198 

Castle of Otranto, The, 610, 645-6 

Castle of Perseverance, The, 223 

Catiline, 335 

Cato, 537 

Cat's Pilgrimage, The, 766 note 

Cavendish, George (1500-61?), 235 

Caxton, William (1422 7-91 ?), 196, 199, 
208-9 

Cecilia, ii'i.'z 

Centlivre, Mrs. (1680 ?-i722), 496 

ChanuBlcoii, 465 

Chamberlayne, William (1619-89), 430-1 

Chambers, Mr. E. K., 417 

Chambers, Robert (1802-71), 793 

Champion , The, 601 sq. 

Changeling, The, 345 

Chanson de Roland, 6 

Chapman, George (1559 ?-i634 ?), 342, 

356-7 
Character, the, 375 sq., 453 



Characteristics, Shaftesbury's, 543-4 
Character of a Trimmer, 511 
Charlemagne Romances, English, loi 
Chatterton, Thomas (1752-70), 585-6 
Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340 7-1400), 22, 
40, 68, 69, 75, 82, 83, 107 note, no, 
116-30, 142-5, and Book HI. passim, 

152-4 
Chaumpaigne, Cecilia de, 115 
Cheke, Sir John (1514-57), 236-7 
Cherry and the Slae, The, 459-61 
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 

Earl of (1694-1773), 621, 642-5 
Chester Plays, The, zzi sq. 
Chezy Chase, 201 
Child, Professor, 204 note 
Chtlde Harold, 667 sq. 
Chillingworth, William (1602-44), 446 
Chloris, 278 
Chochilaicus, 3 

Choice Collection, Watson's, 580 
Chrestien de Troyes, 44 
Christ, 10 note sq., 13 
Christabcl, 57, 75, 89, 654 sq. 
Christ and Satan, 10 
Christian Morals, 452 
Christinas Eve and Easter Day, 734 
" Christopher North," 695-7 
Christ's Kirk on the Green, 181 
Christ's Victory, 359 
Chronicle, the Anglo-Saxon, 17, 18, 19, 

24-26 
Chronicles of Carlingford, 756 
Chiysal, 609 

Churchill, Charles (1731-64), 584 
Churchyard, Thomas (1520 7-1604), 252 
Cibber, Colley (1671-1757), 494, 496 
Citizen and l^plandishman. The, i6rj 
Citizen of the World, The, 618 sq. 
City Madam, The, 433 
City of Dread fill Night, The, 786 
Civil Wars, History of the, 353 
Clare, John (1793-1864), 717 
Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of 

(1608-74), 452-3 
Clarissa, 599 sq. 

Clarke, Samuel (1675-1729), 542 
"Classical" metres, 271-2 
Cleanness, 78, 79 
Cleomenes, 498 

Cleveland, John (1^13-58), 424-5 
Cloister and the Hearth, J he, 750 



INDEX 



803 



Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819-61), 777-8 
Cobbett, William (1762-1835), 705 
Cock Lane Ghost, The, 584 
Ccelia, 'zrj'j 
Ccelica, 2ri\-<^ 

Cokain, Sir Aston (1608-84), 438 
Coleridge, Hartley (1796-1849), 705, 720 
Coleridge, Samuel T. (1772-1834), 57, 

83. 653-7 
Colin Clout, Skelton's, 170 
Collier, Jeremy (1650-1726), 496, 526 
Collins, Charles Alston (1828-73), 755 
Collins, Mr. Churton, 348 note, 456 note 
Collins, Wilkie (1824-89), 755 
Collins, William (1721-59), 573-5 
Colman, George, the Elder (1732-94), 

621, 639 
Colman, George, the Younger (1762- 

1836), 639 and note 
Colonna, Guido, 124 
Comedy of Errors, The, 321 
Coinplamt, Lyndsay's, 178 
Complaint, The, Young's, 561 
Complaint of Buckingham, 229, 257-9 
Complaint of Pity, 122-3 
Complaint of Rosamond, 353 
Complaint of Scotland, 171, 464-5 
Complaiftts of Mars and Venus, 122 
Complete Angler, The, 456 
-Gomus, 43, 57, 394-5 
Confederacy, The, 494 
Confessio Amafitis, 139-40 
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 

703, 706 
Congreve, William (1670-1729), 492-3, 

505. 555-6 
Connoisseur, The, 621 
Conquest of Granada, The, 497 
Conscious Lovers, The, 534-5 
Consolidator, The, 547 
Constable, Henry (i562?-i6i3?), 277-8 
Constant Couple, The, 495 
Constantia and Philetus, 404 
Contention of A j ax and Ulysses, The, 435 
Cooper's Hill, 405-6 
Corbet, Richard (1582-1635), 422 
Coriolanus, 325 
Cory. See Johnson 
Cotton, Charles (1630-87), 428 
Country Wife, The, 490-1 
Courthope, Mr., 189 note, 549 note 
Court of Love, The 119 



Court of I 'en us. The, 459 
Coventry, Francis ( ?-i7S9). 609 
Coventry flays. The, 221 sq. 
Coverdale, Miles (1488-1568), 213 
Cowley, Abraham (1618-67), 402-5, 

507-8 
Cowley, Mrs. (Hannah Parkhurst) (1743- 

1809), 639 
Cowper, William (1731-1800), 588-90 
Crabbe, George (1754-1832), 590-1 
Craik, Sir Henry, 528 note 
Cranford, 749-50 

Cranmer, Thomas (1489-1556), 213-14 
Crashaw, Richard (16137-49), 412-14 
Crazy Tales, 596 note 
Creation, 555 
Cressid(a). See Chaucer, Dryden, 

Henryson, Shakespeare, Troilus 
Crimean War, The, 763 
Critic, The, 640-1 
Crowne, John (16407-1703?), 499 
Crown of Laurel, The, 168-9 
Cruise upon Wheels, A, 755 
Cuckoo and the Nightingale, The, 119 

note 
"Cuckoo Song," etc., 66 
Cudwortb, Ralph (1617-88), 446 
Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811), 621, 

639 

Cupid and I-'syche, Marmion's, 438 

" Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell." See 

Bronte 
Cursor Mundi, The, 71-3, 84 note, 93 
Cymbcline, 328 

" Cyneheard and Cynewulf," 20 
Cynewulf, the poet, 11 sq. 
Cynthia's Revels, 333 
Cypress Grove, Ihe, 463 

DAME SIRIZ, 61 note 

Damon and Pythias, 231 

Dance in the Queen's Chamber, 187 

Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, 187 

Daniel, Samuel (1562-1619), 277, 352-3 

Daniel Deronda, 752 

Darkness, 667 sq. 

Darley, George (1795-1846), 721-2 

Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-82), 792-3 

Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802), 597 

Davenant, Sir William (1606-68), 429, 

430, 437. 485 note 
Davenport, Robert ( 7- 7), 438 



So4 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



David and Bcthsabe, 289 

David Coppcrficld, 740 sq. 

Davidcis, The, 403-4 [355 

Davies, John, of Hereford (1565-1618), 

Davies, Sir John (i569?-i626J, 345 

Davy, Adam (14th cent.), 76 

Day, John ( ?- ?), 341, 348 

Death's ycst Book, 722 

Decasyllabic, the, 58 

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 

The, 625-7 
Defence of Giiencveie, The, 783. 
Defence of Poesy, Sidney's, 261 sq. 
Defence of Poetry, Shelley's, 671 
Defence of Rhyme, Daniel's, 353 
Defoe, Daniel (1659-1731), 546-8 
Deguilleville, Guillaume de, 136 note 
Dekker, Thomas ( ?- ?), 341, 343-4 
Delia, 277 

" Delia Cruscans," the, 597 
" Democritus Junior," 378 
Denham, Sir John (1615-69), 405-6 
Denis Duval, The, 745 
De Nugis Curialium, 43 
Deor, The Complaint of 7 
Deploration of Queen Magdalene, 179 
De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859), 

702-4 . 
De Rcgimine Principum, 161 
Deserted Village, The, 617 sq. 
Destructioti of Troy, The, 106-7 
De Tabley, Lord (1835-95), 786 
Devil is an Ass, The, 335 
Devil's Law Case, The, JH^ 
Dialogues on Medals, 536-7 
Diana, orj-j 

Dickens, Charles (1812-70), 740-3 
Dictionary, Johnson's, 614 sq. 
Diclla, 278 

Digby Mysteries, The, 221 sq. 
" Dirce," 673 

Directions to Sen-ants, 532 
Dirge on Edward I V., i6g 
Discoveries, Ben Jonson's, 374 
Disobedient Child, The, 226 
Dispensary, The, 555 
Divine Legation of Moses, The, 632 
Dobell, Sydney (1824-74), 777 
Dobson, Mr. Austin, 534 note, 558 note 
Doctor, The, 707 
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (1832-98), 

786 



Dodsley's Miscellany, 582 and note 

Don Carlos, 500 

Don Juan, 667 sq. 

Donne, John (i573?-i63i), 279, 365-8, 

385-6 " 
Don Sebastian, 498 
Dorset, ist and 6th Earls of. See Sack- 

ville 
" Dotages," Jonson's, 335 
Double Dealer, The, 492-3 
Douglas, 637 

Douglas, Gawain (i474?-i522), 188-92 
Dowden, Professor, 661 note 
Do-well, Do-bcf, and Do-best, 135 sq. 
Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings (i8io-88), 

786 
Dramatic Poesy, Essay of, 508-9 
Dramatis Personcs, 734 
Drant, Thomas {d. 1578?), 271 
Drapier's Letters, The, 532 
Drayton, Michael (i563?-i63i), 277, 

350-2 
Dream, Byron's, 667 sq. 

Lyndsay's, 178 
Dream of the Rood, The, 10 sq. 
" Drolleries," 431 
Drummer, The, 537 
Drunimond, William (1585-1649), 

331-2, 463-4 
Dryden, John (1631-1700), 83, 152, 

472-7, 485-6, 506-9, 524, 528, 555, 

564-6, 580, 651 
Duchess of Malfy, The, 348 
Duke of Guise, The, 498, 502 
Dunbar, William (i465?-i530?), 185-8 
Dunciad, The, 550 sq. 
Dunton, John (1659-1733), 527 
D'Urfey, Tom (1653-1723), 580-1 and 

note 
Dyer, Sir Edward {d. 1607), 272 
Dyer, John (i7oo?-i758), 572 
Dykes-Campbell, Mr., 667 note 

EARLE, Professor, i note, 19, 20, 28 

7tote, 152 
Earl of Toulouse, The, 97 
Earthly Paradise, The, 783-4 
Eastward Ho I 342 
Ecclesiastical Polity, 299, 300 
PIdgeworth, Maria (1767-1849) , 683-4 
Edinburgh Review, The, 691-4 
Edward /., 289 



INDEX 



805 



Edivard II., ^cjZ-'^ 

Edward III., 329 

Edwards, Richard (i6th cent.), 231, 250 

" E. K.," 266 

Eleanor Rummiiig, The Tunning of, 
169 

Elene, St., 14 

Elfric (loth-iith cent), 27 

" Eliot, George." See Evans, M. A. 

Elliott, Ebenezer (1781-1849), 717 

Ellis, George (1753-1815), 66, 89 note, 
596 and note 

Elphin, The Misfortunes of, 688-g 

Elton, Mr. Oliver, 350 

Elyot, Sir Tliomas (i490?-iS46), 234-5 

Emare, 96 

Emma, 682 

Empedocles on Etna, 776 

Empr^s of Morocco, The, 499 

Endvmion, Lord Beaconsfield's, 686 
Keats's, 672 
Lyly's, 283 

England's Helicon, 250 note, 279 

England's Hcroical Epistles, 352 

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 
667 

English Rogue, The, 517 

Enoch Arden, 731 

Enquirer, 'J he, 635 

Enquiry Concerning Human Under- 
standing, 623 

Enquiry into the Present State of Polite 
Learning in Europe, 617-18 

Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, 
623 

Eothen, 763 

Epic of Women, The, 785 

Plpicurean, The, 674, 686 

Epistles, Pope's, 550 sq. 

Epistle to Curio, 579-80 

Epithalamium, Spenser's, 268 

Epsom Wells, 488 

Erceldoune, Thomas of (13th cent.), 171 

Esmond, 745 

Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 508-9 

Essay on Criticism, 550 sq. 

Essay on. Man, 550 sq. 

Essay on Projects, 547 

Essay on the Human Understanding, 

523 sg- 

Essays, Moral and Political, 623 
Essays in Criticism, 767 sq. 



Essays of Elia, 700 

Etherege, Sir George (i635?-9i?), 484, 

486-7 
Euphues and Eupliuism, 240, 295-9 
Evans, Mary Ann (Mrs. Cross, " George 

Eliot") (1819-80), 751 
Evelina ^ 612 

EveTynTjohn (1620-1706), 518-19 
Every Man in [and out of] his Humour, 

331-3 
Evidences, Paley's, 633 
Examiner, The, Swift's, 529 

Leigh Hunt's, 700 
Example of I 'irtue. The, 165 
Excursion, The, 659 sq. 
Exeter Book, The, 2, 10 and note 
Exodus, A. S. and M. E. See Genesis 
Experience and a Courtier, Dialogue 

between, 177 

FABLE OF THE BEES, The, 544 
Fables, Dryden's, 473 sq. 

G.iy's, 560 

Henryson's, 184 
Fabyan, Robert (late 15th cent.), 208 
Faerie Queene, The, 267-70 
Fairfax, Edward ( ?-i635), 357 
Fair Quarrel, A, 345 
Faithful Shepherdess, The, 340 
Falconer, William (1732-69), 583 
Farquhar, George (1678-1707), 494-5 
Fatal Curiosity, 638 
Fatal Marriage, The, 505 
Fates of the Apostles, The, 14 
Felltham, Owen (i6o2?-68?), 455 
Ferdinand, Count Fathom, 605 sq. 
Ferguson, Sir Samuel (1810-86), 739 
Fergusson, Robert (1750-74), 594 
E'er rex and Porrex, '2.'2<^ 
Ferrier, Susan (1782-1854), 684 
Fidelia, 362 
Fidessa, 278 

Fielding, Henry (1707-54), 601-5 
Fig for Momus, A, 279 
Finchale, Godric of (12th cent.), ^oiiote 
Finnsburg, The Fight at, I 7iote, 7, 17 
First Blast of the Trumpet, The, 465 
Fisher, John (I459?-IS53), 210-11 
FitzGerald, Edward (1809-83), 736-7 
Five Hundred Points of Good Hus- 
bandly, 253 
Flaming Heart, The, 414 



8o6 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Flatman, Thomas (1637-88), 425, 479 
Flecknoe, Richard ( ?-i678),425 
Fletcher, Andrew (of SaUoun) (1655- 

1716), 523 
Fletcher, Giles, Elder (1549-1611), 277 
Fletcher, Giles, Younger (1588-1623), 

359-60 
Fletcher, John (1579-1625), 336-40 
Fletcher, Phineas (1582-1650?), 359-60 
Florence of Rome, 96 
Florio, John (1553-1625), 302 
Flower and the Leaf, The, 119 
" Flytings," 175, 178, 187, 461 
Fool of Quality, The, 609-10 
Fool 's Tragedy, The, 722 
Ford, John ( ?- ?), 433-4 
Fortescue, Sir John (i394?-i476?), 208 
Four Elements, The, 224 
Four Hymns, Spenser's, 268 
Four Letters (Spenser's and Harvey's), 

271, 306 
Four PP, The, 224-5 
Fox, George (1624-91), 522 
Francis, Sir Philip (1740-1818), 647 
Fraser, Professor Campbell, 523 note 
Fraser's Afagazine, 698 sq. 
Fraunce, Abraham ( 15877-1633) , 272-3 
Frederick the Great, Carlyle's, 760 
Freeman, Edward Augustus (1823-92), 

764 
French Revolution, The, 760 
Frerc, John Hookham (1769-1846), 596 

and note, 667 
Friars of Berwick, The, 186-7 
Friend, The, 655-6 
Friendship's Garland, "jbj-^ 
Froissart, Lord Berners's, 198-9 
Froude, James Anthony (1818-94), 

765-6 
Fudge Family, The, 674 
F"uller, Thomas (1608-61), 441-3 
Funeral, The, 534 
Furnivall, Dr., 65 note, 161 notes, 194 

GALT, John (1779-1839), 684-5 
Gamely n. Tale of, 118,325 
Game of Chess, A, 345 
Gammer Gurtott's Needle, 228-9 
Garden of Cyrus, The, 451-2 
" Garlands," 431 

Garmond of Good Ladies. The, 185 
Garth, Sir Samuel (1661-1719), 555 



Gascoigne, George (15257-77), 233, 

254-6 
Gascoigne, Thomas (1403-58), 117 note, • 

206 note '. 

Gaskeli, Mrs. (Elizabeth Stevenson) 

(1810-65), 749-50 
Gau, John (16th cent.), 464 note 
Gawatn and the Green Knight, 78, 

103-4 
Gay, John (1685-1732), 558-60 
Gebir, 673 
Genesis and Exodus, the Caedmonian, 

II, 13 
Genesis and Exodus, the Middle-Eng- 
lish, 56, 57 
Gentleman Dancing Afaster, The, 490 
Gentle Shepherd, The, 593 
Geoffrey, Gaimar, 43 
Geoffrey Hamlyn, 755 , 

Geoffrey of Monmouth (12th cent.) 

dflsq. 
George Barnwell, 638 
Gibbon, Edward (1737-94), 625-7 
Gifford Humphrey (16th cent.), 276 
Gifford, William (1756-1826), 596 
Gildas, 42 

Gilpin, William (1724-1804), 648 
Glanvill, Joseph (1636-80), 518 
Glapthorne, Henry ( ?- ?),438 
Gloucester, Robert of (13th cent.), 63-65 
Glover, Richard (1712-85), 578, 637 
Goblin Market, 782 
Goblins, The, 436 
Godolphin, Sidney (1610-43), 4^7 
Godric of Finchale (12th cent.), 40 note 
Godwin, William (1756-1836), 612, 

634-S 
Golagros and Ga7vane, 175, 195 
Golden Grove, The, 440 
Golden Targe, The, 187 
Golden Treasury, The, 785 
Golding, Arthur (i536?-i6o5?), 251 
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-74), 114 and ^'L^ 

note, 613, 617-20, 623, 639 
" Golias," 44 
Gollancz, Mr., i, 2 7?ote, 10 note, 78 

ttote 
Gondibert, 429-30 

Good-natured Man, The, 618 sq., 639 
Googe, Barnabe (1540-94), 254 
Gorboduc, 229 
Gore, Mrs. (1799-1861), 690 



INDEX 



807 



Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, 

The, 250 
Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 575 note, 722 note 
Gosson, Stephen (1555-1624), 232 7iote, 

305 
Governance of England, 208 
Governour, The 235 
Gower, John (i325?-i4o8), 138-42 
Grace Abounding, 514 
Grave, The, Blair's, 572 
Grave Foem, The, 17, 39 
Gray Thomas (17 16-71), 575 
Great Rebellion, History of the, 453 
Green, John Richard (1837-83), 764-5 
Green. Matthew (1696-1737), 572 
Greene, Robert (i56o?-92), 285-6, 290, 

305 
Gregory, St., Alfred's Version, 24, 25 
Gregory, St., his Dialogues, 28 note 
GrendeJ, 5 
Grettir the Strong, 4 
Greviile, Fulke, Lord Brooke (1554- 

1628), 274-s 
Grimald, Nicholas (1519-62?), 248-9 
Groat 's-worth of Wit, 285 
Grongar Hill, 564, 572 
Grosart, Dr., Books V., VI., and VII. 

notes passim 
Grote, George (1794-1871), 710-11 
Grove, Matthew (i6th cent.), 276 
Gryll Grange, 688-9 
Gude and Godlie Ballates, The, 458-9 
Guest, Edwin (1800-80), his English 

Rhythms, 17 note, 36 
Guevara, 198 

Guiipin, Edward {fl. 1598), 279 
Guthlac, St., 14 
Guy Afannering, 624 
Guy of Wanoick, 94, 95 

HABINGTON, WilHam (1605-54), 

421-2 
Hake, Thomas Gordon (1809-94), 739 
Hakluyt, Ricliard (1552 ?-i6i6), 381 
Hales, John (1584-1656), 445 
Halifax, George Savile, Marquess of 

(1633-95), 510-1 1 
Hall, Bishop Joseph (1574-1656), 384-5 
Hallam, Henry (1777-1859), 708-9 
Halliwell, J. O., 100 note, 148 7iote, 158 

note 
Hamlet, 326, 327 



Hampole, Richard Rolle of (14th cent.), 

59,62,73-76 ,.- • 

Handling Sin, 70 -— -''^ ^-^ 

Hannah, John (1818-88), 464 
Harrington, James (1611-77), 457 
Har(r)ington, Sir John (1561-1612), 

457 "ote 
Harroiving of Hell, The, 155 tiote, 220 

?iote 
Harry, Blind ("Henry the Minstrel") 

(15th cent.), 173-5 
Harvey, Gabriel (1545-1630), 271 
Havelok the Dane, 83-87 
Hawes, Stephen ( ?-i523 ?), 163-6 

Hawker, Robert Stephen (1803-75), 

719-20 
Hawkesworth, John (1715-73), 609, 620 
Hayley, William (1745-1820), 597 
Hayward, Sir John (1564-1627), 381 
Haywood, Eliza (1693 7-1756), 599 
Hazlitt, Mr. VV. C, Books IV., V., and 

VI. notes passim 
Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 701-2 
Head, Richard (1637 ?-i686), 517 
Heber, Reginald (1783-1826), 717 
Hecatompathia, The, 273 
Heliconia, 250 note, '2^'2 note 
Hemans, Mrs. (Felicia Dorothea 

Browne) (1793-1835), 717 
Hendying, Proverbs of, 59 
Henry IV., V., VI., '/- 7//., 322-3, 328 
Henryson, Robert (15th cent.), 182-5 
Heorot, 3 sq. 
Heorrenda, 7 
Herbert, Edward, Lord, of Cherbury 

(1583-1648), 456-7 
Herbert, George (1593-1633), 414-16, 

446 
Hereiihird the Wake, 755 
Hermanric, 2 
Hermit, The, 562 
Hero and Leander, 290 
Heroes and Hero- Worship, 760 
Heroic Stanzas, 473 
Herrick, Robert (1591-1674), 418-19 
Hesperides, 418-19 

Heywood, Jasper (1535-98), 225, 251 
Heywood, John (1497 ?-i58o?), 225 
Heywood, Thomas ( 7-1650?), 341, 

346 
Higden, Ralph (I3th-i4th cent.), 147-8 
Hind and the Panther, The, 473 sq. 



8o8 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Htstoria Britoiium, 42 

Historia Trojana, 124 

History of England, Daniel's, 353 

History of Latin Christianity, 710 

Hoadly, Benjamin (1676-1761), 542 

Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 453-5 

Hogg, James (1770-1835), 684, 687,698, 

715-16 
Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809), 612 
Holinshed, Raphael ( 7-1580), 241 

note 
Holland, Philemon (1552-1637), 302 
Holland, Sir Richard (15th cent.), 175 
Holy Dying, 440 
Holy Grail, Lonelich's, 194-5 
Holy Living, 440 
Holy War, The, 514-15 
Home, John (1722-1808), 637 
Homer, Chapman's, 356-7 
Hobbes's, 454 
Pope's, 550 sq. 
Honest Whore, The, 344 
Hood, Thomas (1799-1845), 718 
Hook, Theodore (1788-1841), 690 
Hooker, Richard (1554-1600), 299, 300, 

506-7 
Horatian Ode, A, iY2.b 
Horn, King (or Horn, Child), 87, 88 
Home, Richard Hengist (1803-84), 721 
Horstmann, Dr., 64 note, 69 note, 74 

note, 262 note 
Houghton, Richard Monckton Milncs, 

Lord (1809-85), 739 
Howell, James {c. 1594-1666), 455-6 
Howell, Thomas (i6th cent.), 215-16 
Howlat, Book of the, 175 
Hrothgar, 3 sq. 
" Huchowne," 102-3 note 
Hudibras, 478-9 
Hume, David (1711-76), 622-4 
Humorous Lieutenant, The, 340 
" Humour " and " humours," 332 
Humphrey Clinker, 605 sq. 
Hunferth, 6 
Hunt, Leigh (1784-1859), 671, 700-1, 

715-16 
Hunting of the Hare, The, 99 
Huon of Bordeaux, 198-9 
Hurd, Bishop Richard (1720-1808), 650 

note 
Husband's Message, The, 17 
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-95), 793-4 



Hydriotaphia, ^^\, 468 
Hygelac, 3 sq. 
Hymen's Triumph, 353 
Hymn to Contentment, 562 
Hymn to the Pillory, 547 
Hypatia, 754 

IDEA, 351 

Idylls of the King, The, jyi sq. 

Imaginary Conversations, 704-5 

Imaginary Portraits, 773 note 

" Imagination," eighteenth-century idea 

of, 565 
Inchbald, Mrs. (1753-1821), 612 
Indian Emperor, The, 497 
Induction, Sackville's, 229, 257-9 
Inheritance, The, 684 
In Memoriam, 709, 730 sq. 
Inner Temple Masque, The, 361 
Instructions, Gascoigne's, 255 
Io7iica, iZb 
Ipomydon, 98, 99 
Irene, 615, 637 
Irish Melodies, 674 
// is Never too Late to Mend, 750 

JACK JUGGLER, zjxb 

Jack Wilton, 305 ^ 

James, G. P. R. (1801-60), 685 

James L of England (1566-1625), 466 

James I. of Scotland (1394-1437), 180-2 

Jane Eyre, 748 

Jefferies, Richard (1848-87), 792 

Jeffrey, Francis (1773-1850), 692-3 

Jeronimo, 290 

Jests of George Peek, 285 

Jew of Malta, The, 292 

John Bull, History of, 541 

John Buncle, 609-10 

Johnson (or Cory), William (1823-92), 

786 
Johnson, Samuel (1709-84), 411, 449, 

476, 504-5. 539. 555. 566, 574. 600, 604, 

613-17. 637. 648-52 
Johnstone, Charles (1719 ?-i8oo ?), 6C9 
Jonathan Wild, 602 sq. 
Jones, Ebenezer (1820-60), 786 
Jonson, Ben (1573-1637), 331-6, 363-5, 

373-5 
Joseph Andrews, 602 sq. 
Joseph of Arimathea, 105-6 
Joseph of Exeter, 40 



INDEX 



809 



yournal to Stella, 531 

yourney fro7n this \\ 'or Id to the Next, 

602 sq. 
yourney to the Western Islands, 615 sq. 
yovial Crew, The, 437 
yiidith, 10, 13 
yuliana, St., 14 
ytilius Ccesar, 325 
Junian MS., 10 
" Junius," 646-8 
yiire Divino, 547 
Jusserand, M., 138 note, 181 note 

KEATS, John (1795-1821), 671-3 
Kehama, The Curse of, 662-3 
Kennedy, Walter (1460 ?-i5o8 ?), 175 
Ker, Professor, 464 

Ker, Robert, Earl of Ancrum, 466 note 
King, Bishop Henry (1592-1669), 426-7 
King Alisaunder, 89 
King and No King, A, 338, 340 
King Arthur , Dryden's, 505 note 
King Athelstone, 100 
King Edzvard and the Shepherd, 100 
King Hart, 190-1 
King Horn, 87, 88 
King yohn. Bale's, 227 
Shakespeare's, 322 
King yohn and Matilda, 438 
Kinglake, Alexander (1809-91), 762-3 
King Lear, 43, 326-7 
King of Tars, The, 96 
Kingsley, Charles (1819-75), 753-5 
Kingsley, George (1827-92), 755 note 
Kingsley, Henry (1830-76), 755 
King's Quair, The, 180-2 
Knolles, Richard (1550-1610), 301 
Knowles, James Sheridan (1784-1862), 

721 note 
Knox, John (1505-72), 465 
Kolbing, Dr. Eugen, 88 
Kubla Khan, 657 
Kyd, Thomas (i6th cent.), 286, 290 

LA BELLE DAME SANS MEN CI, 

672-3 
Lady of May, The, 261 and note 
Lady of Pleasure, The, 435 
Laing, David, 96 note 
Lalla Rookh, The, 674 
Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 699, 700 
Lament for the Makers, 175, 188 



Lancashire Witches, The, 488 
Lancelot of the Laik, 194 
Landon, L. E. See L. E. L. 
Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864), 

673-4. 704-5 
Langhorne, John (173S-79). 587 
Langland or Langley, W. (14th cent.), 

131-8, 165 
Langtoft, Peter {d. 1307 ?), 65 
Last Day, The, 560 
Latimer, Hugh (1485-1555), 212-13 
Latter- Day Pamphlets, 760 
Laurn, 288 

Layamon {fl.. 1200), 18, 43, 48 sq., 50 
Lay of the Last Afinsfrel, The, 663 sq. 
Lays of .4ncient Rome, 719 
Lear, I\ing, 326-7 
Lee, Nathaniel (1653 ?-92), 502-4 
Lee, Mr. S. L., 198 note, 199 
Le Fraine, 98 

Legend of Good Women, The, 125-6 
Legends of .Saints, Bokenam's, 162 
Leighton, Archbishop Robert (1611-84), 

446 
" L. E. L." = Landon, Letitia Elizabeth 

(1802-38), 717-18 
Leland, John (1506-52), 235-6 
Ixofric, Bishop, 2 
L'Estrange, Sir Roger (1616-1704), 

525-6 
Letter to a Noble Lord, .4, 629 S(q. 
Letters, Aschaiii's, 238-9 

Chesterfield's, 642 sq. 

Howell's, 455-6 

Lady Mary's, 642 sq. 

ofyunius, 646-8 

Paston, 238 note 

Walpole's, 642 sq. 
Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 650 

note 
Lever, Charles (1806-72), 689 
Leviathan, 454 
Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818), 

611 
Libertine, The, 488 
Liberty, Thomson's, 569 
Liberty of Prophesying, The, 440 
Liber Veritatum, 117 note, 206 note 
LAcia, T.'j'j 

Life and Death ofyason. The, 783 
Life Drama, A, 777 
Life of Byron, 674 



8io 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Life of Johnson, 648 
Life of Napoleon, 680 
Life of Schiller, 759, 762 
Life of Scott, 697-8 
Life of Sterling, 760 
Light of Nature Pursued, The, 634 
Lillo, George (1693-1739), 638 
Lingard, John (1771-1851), 708 
" Little, Thomas," 674 
Little Dorrit, 740 sq. 
Lives of Saints, A.S., Bk. \. passim 
Barbour's (?), 172 
Bokenam's, 162 
M.E., 64,65 
Lives of the Poets, Johnson's, 615 sq. 
Locke, John (1632-1704), 523-5 [778 
Locker-Lainpson, Frederick (1821-95), 
Lockhart, John Gibson (1794-1854), 

688, 696-8 
Lodge, Thomas (i558?-i625), 279, 287, 

290, 30s 
Logan, John (1748-88), 594 
London, Johnson's, 614 
L.ondon Lickpenny, 160 
London Lyrics, 778 
London Afagazine, The, 695 sq. 
Lonelich, Henry (15th cent.), 194-5 
Looker- On, The, 621 
Lounger, The, 621 
Love and a Bottle, 495 
Love for Love, 493 
Love in a Tub, 484 sq. 
Love in a Wood, 490 
Lovelace, Richard (1618-58), 424 
Lover's Melancholy, The, 434 
Love Rune, The, 60 note, 66 note 
Love's Labour's Lost, 321 
Love's Last Shift, 494 
Love's yi dories, 430 
Lushington, Professor, 672 
Lybeaus Desconus, 96 
Lycidas, 394-6 

Lydgate, John (i370?-i45i?), 158-60 
Lying Lover, The, 535 
Lyly, John (i554?-i6o6?), 282-4, 288-9, 

295-9, 321 [176-9 

Lyndsay, Sir David (1490 ?-i555 ?), 119, 
Lyrical Ballads, the, 653 
Lytton, Edward George BuUver, Lord 

(1803-73), 686-7, 721 note 
Lytton, Edward Robert, Earl of (1831- 

90.778 



MACAULAY, Thomas Babington 

(1800-59), 712-14, 719 
Macbeth, 326-7 
MacFlecknoe, 475 sq. 
Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831), 611-12, 

621 
Mackenzie, Sir George (1636-91), 523 
Mackintosh, Sir James (1765-1832), 

708, 711-12 
Madden, Sir Frederic (1801-73), 49 «c/^, 

65 note 
^L1ginn, William (1793-1842), 698-9 
Maiden Queen, The, 497 
Maid's Metamorphosis, The, 284 note 
Maid's Tragedy, The, 338-40 , 

Maine, Sir Henry James Sumner (1822- 

88), 789-90 
Mair or Major, John (15th cent.), 174 
Malcontent, The, 343 
Maldon, The Battle of, 17 
Male Regie de T. Occlei'e, La, 161 
Mallet or Malloch, David (i705?-6s), 

578, 637 
Malory, Sir Thomas (15th cent.), 195-7 
Mandeville, Bernard de (1670-1733), 544 
Mandeville, Sir John (14th cent.), 148-51 
Manley, Mrs. (1672 ?-i724), 599 
Manning, Robert (i3th-i4th cent.), 65 

and note, 87 and note 
Man of Mode, The, 487 
Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820-71), 

788-9 
Mansfield Park, 682-3 
Map or Mapes, Walter, 43, 50 
Margaret, Saint, 80 note 
Marlowe, Christopher (1564-93), 286, 

291-3, 321 
Marmion, 176, 664 sq. 
Marmion, Shakerley (1603-39), 438 
Marprelate, Martin, 280, 304 
Marriage of Wit and Science, 226 
Marryat, Captain Frederick (1792-I1 ,^j, 

689 
Marston, John (1575 7-1634), his satires, 

279 ; his plays, 343 
Martian us Capclla, 158 
Marvell, Andrew (1621-78), 425-6,481, 

522 
Maty Barton, 749-50 
Mason, William (1724-97), 583, 637 
Masques, Ben Jonson s, 335-6 
Massinger, Philip (1583-1640), 432-3 



INDEX 



8ii 



Maturin, Charles Robert (1782-1824), 

690 
Maud, 12, 731 

May, Thomas (1595-1650), 438 
Mayne, Jasper (1604-72), 438 
Mayor of Queetiborougk, The, 345 
Measure for Measure, 321, 323, 325 
Alcdal, Tlie, 474 
Medal of John Daves, The, 487 
Melibee, Tale of 143-4, 245 
Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, 609 
Men and Women, 734 
Meredith, Mr. George, 756 
" Meredith, Owen," 778 
Meres Francis (1565-1647), 284 
Merlin, Lonelich's, 194 
Aferlin, the prose, 90 
Merry, Robert (1755-98), 597 
" Merry sang the monks of Ely," 40 

>!ofe 
Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 323-4 
" Metaphysicals," the, 411 sq. 
Michel of Northgate, Dan(i4thcent.),69 
Mickle, William Julius (1735-88) 587 
Microcosmus, 438 

Middleton, Conyers (1683-1750), 540-1 
Middleton, Thomas (15707-1627), 341, 

345 
Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 2,'2.'2. 
Mill, James (1773-1836), 711 
Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 787-8 
Miller, Hugh (1S02-56), 793 
Milman, Henry Hart (1791-1868), 710 
Milnes, R. M. See Houghton, Lord 
Milton, John (1608-74), 392-402, 447-8 
Minot, Laurence (14th cent.), 76-78 
Minstrel, The, 585-6 
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 664 sq. 
Mirror, The, 621 

Mirror for Magistrates, The, 2.^6 sq. 
Mis'^'-llanies, Elizabethan, 248 sq. 
Mis^ ,,4anies, mid-seventeenth-century, 

431 
Misfortunes of Arthur, The, 232 
Mitford, William (1744-1827), 708 
Mithridates, 502-4 
Modern Painters, 769 sq. 
Modest Proposal, A, 532 
Monarchical Tragedies, Stirling's, 462 
Monarchie, The, Lyndsay's, 177 
Monarchy, Greville's, 274 
Monks and the Giants, The, 596 note 



Monmouth, Geoffrey of (12th cent.), 

42^,7. 
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1689- 

1762), 598, 600 
Montgomerie, Alexander (i556?-i6io?), 
. 459-61 
Montgomery, James (1771-1854), 716 
Montgomery, Robert (1807-55), 716 
Moijtrose, James Graham, Marquis of 

(1612-50), 464 
Moore, Edward (1712-57), 621 
Moore, John (1719-1802), 612 
Moore, Thomas (1779-1852), 674-5 
Moralities, 222 sq. 
Moral Ode, The, 54 
More, Hannah (1745-1833), 612 
More, Henry (1614-87), 429 
More, Sir Thomas (1478-1535), 211-12 
Morley, Professor H., I note, 39 note, 

40 note, 164, 219, 375 note 
Morris, Dr. R., 55 and Book H. notes 

passim 
Morris, William (1834-96), 783-5 
Morte d' Arthure, the alliterative, 106 
the fifteenth-century rhymed, 194 
Malory's, 196-7 
Tennyson's, 729 sq. 
Moi'timeriados, 352 
Mother Hubbard's Tale, 268 
Mourning Bride, The, 492 sq. 
Mr. Dadman, Life and Death of, 515 
A[rs. Perkins's Ball, 744 
Mrs. Veal, Relation of, 547 
Afuch Ado About Nothing, 324-5 
Afulberty Garden, The, 489 
Mulcaster, Richard (i53o?-i6ii), 301 
Mulgrave, John, Sheffield, Earl of (and 

Duke of Buckinghamshire) (1649- 

1721), 482 
Munday, Anthony (1553-1633), 284 and 

note 
A/uses' Library, The, 581 
Music and Moonlight, 785 
Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 678 
Mysterious Mother, The, 645-6 

NABBES, Thomas (1605?- ?) , 437-8 
" Namby-Pamby," 556 
Napier, Sir William (1785-1860), 708 
Nash, Thomas (1567-1601), 287, 290, 

305 
Nassington, William of (15th cent.), 163 



8l2 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Nennius {fi. 796?), 42 

Nepenthe, 722 

Nero, 502 

New Arabian Nights, 756-7 

New Bath Guide, The, 596 note 

Netvcomes, The, 745 

Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801- 

90) , 790-1 
New Way to Pay Old Debts, A, 433 
Nibelttngen Lied, 6, 7 
Nice Wanton, The, 226 
Nicholas de Guildford (13th cent.), 

60 
Nicholson, Mr. E. B., 148 note 
Night-Piece on Death, 562 
Night- Thoughts, 560-1 
Noble Numbers, 418, 419 
Nodes Ambrosianae, 696 
Nocturnal Reverie, A, 562-3 
North, Roger (1653-1734), 522 
North, Sir Thomas (i535?-i6oi?), 302 
Northanger Abbey. 682-3 
Northern Lass The, 437 
Nosce Teipsum, 354 
Nut-bro'wne A/ayde, The, 201-z 
Nyniphidia, 352 

OAK AND THE BRERE, The, 57 
Observer, The, 621 

Occleve, Thomas (i370?-i45o?), 161-2 
Oceana, Froude's, 766 

Harrington's, 457 
Octovian Imperaior, 99, 193 
Ode on a Grecian Urn, 672 
Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 659 

sq. 
Ode on the Death of the Duke of \\ 'elling- 

ton, 731 
Ode on the Nativity, 394 
Ode to Duty, 660 
Odes, Akenside's, 579 

Collins's, 574 

Young's, 561 
O-.dipus, 498, 502 
Old Bachelor, The, 492 
Old Ballads (1723), 580 

Evans's, 587 note 
Old English Baron, The, 610 
Old Fortunatus, 344 
Oldham, John (1653-83), 481-2 
Old Wives' Tale, 289 
Oldys, William (1696-1761), 581 



Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret Oliphant 

Wilson) (1828-97), 755-6 
Oliver Cromwell, Letters and Speeches 

of, 760 
Olor Iscanus, 416 
Omar Khayyam, 357, 737 
Opera, note on, 505 
Orchestra, 354 
Ordinary, The, 438 
Orfeo and Heurodis, 96 note 
Orion, 721 

Orison of our Lady, The, 58 
Orni or Ormin, [f. 1200), 51 sq. 
Ormulum, The, 51 sq. 
Oroonoko, 505 
Orosius, Alfred's, 23 
Orphan, The, 500-2 

Orpheus and Eurydice, Henryson's, 183 
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur Edward (1844- 

81), 785 
Ossian, 581 and note 
Othello. 326-7 
Othere, 23 

Otway, Thomas (1651-85), 500-2 
Overbury, Sir T. (1581-1613), 375-7 
" Owen Meredith," 778 
Owl and the Nightingale, The, 60 
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The, 

780, 783 

PAGAN, Isabel (1740-1821), 593-4 

Paine, Thomas (1737-1809), 634 

Palace of Pleasure, 253 

Paley, William (1743-1805), 633 

Palgrave, Sir Francis (1788-1861), 708 

Pal ice of Honour, The, 190 

Paltock, Robert (1697-1767), 610 

Pamela, 599 sq. 

Panther, The, 14 

Paracelsus, 733 

Paradise Lost, 398 

Paradise of Dainty Devices, The, 250 

Paradise Regained, 398 

Pardoner and Tapster, The, 118 

Paris Sketch Book, The, 744 

Parliament of Bees, The, 348 

Parliament of Fowls, The, 123 

Parnell, Thomas (1679-1718), 561-2 

Parson s Tale, The, 144 

Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 277 

Fast and Present, 760 

Pastime of Pleasure, The, 164-5 



INDEX 



813 



Pasfon Letters, The, 238 note 

Pastoral Ballad, A, 573 

Pastoral Care, The, 24 

Pastorals, Pope's, 550 sq: 

Patchwork, 778 

Pater, Walter Horatio (1839-94), 772-3 

Paternoster, A.S., 28 

M.E., 55 
Patience, 78, 79 
Patient Grissel, 344 
Patmore, Coventry (1823-96), 786 
Pattison, Mark (1813-84), 790 
Pauline, 733 
Pause, law of, 47 
Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866), 

688-9 
Pearl, The, 78-81 

Pearson, Bishop John (1613-86), 445 
Pecock, Reginald (1395-1460), 205-8 
Peebles to the Play, 181 
Peele, George (i558?-97?), 284-5, 288- 

90, 321 
Pelham, 686 

Pendennis, The History of, y^^ 
Penseroso, II, 394 

Pepys, Samuel (1633-1703), 519-22 
Percy, Thomas (1729-1811), 580-1 
Percy, William (1575-1648), 277 
Percy Folio, the, 201 sq. 
Peregrine Pickle, 605 sq. 
Pericles, 28 note, 327-8 
Perkin Warbeck, 434 
Persuasion, 682-3 
Peter Wilkins, 610 
Petition, " Bagsche's," 179 
Phaer, Thomas (d. 1560), 251 sq. 
Phalaris, Dissertation on, 540 
Pharonnida, 430-1 
Pharsalia, Roscoe's, 504-5 
Philarete, 362 
Philaster, 338-9 

Philips, Ambrose (1675 7-1749), 556 
Philips, John (1676-1709), 556 
Philip Sparrow, The Book of, 170 
Philip van Artevelde, 720 
Phi His, 277 
Phixnix, The, 14 
Phrontisterion, 789 
Pickwick Papers, The, J41 sq. 
Picturesque Tours, 648 
Piers Plow/nan, 132-8 
Piers Plowman's Creed, 132 note 



Pilgrim's Progress, The, 513-17 
" Pindar, Peter," 596 
Pindarics, Cowley's, 404-5 
Dryden's, 476 
Sayers's, etc., 596 
Pipe of Tobacco, A, 596 note 
Piscatory Eclogues, 360 
Pistyl of Susan, the, 107-8 
Plain Dealer, The, 490-1 
Plays on the Passions, 641 
Pleasures of Hope, The, 675 
Pleasures of Imagination, 579 
Pleasures of Memory, 715 
Plowman, Piers, 132-8 
Plowman's Tale, 118 
Poema del Cid, 6 
Poema Morale, 54 
Poems by Two Brothers, 727 
Poetaster, The, 333 

Poetical fustice, 634-5 [279 

Poetical Rhapsody, Davison's, 250 Jiote, 
Poetical Sketches, 591-2 
Polite Conversation, 532 
Pofyolbion, The, 351 
Pomfret, Thomas (1667-1702), 482 
Pompey the Little, 609 
Poore, Richard (d. 1237), 53 note 
Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 549-54, 

564-6 
Popish Kingdom, The, 254 note 
Porter, Anna Maria (1780-1832) and 

Jane (1776-1850), 678 and note 
Posie of Gillyflowers, 276 
Praed, Winthrop Mackworth (1802-39), 

718-19 
Prelude, The, 659 sq. 
Pre-Raphaelite School, The, 778-9 
Prick of Conscience, The, 75 
Pride and Prejudice, 682-3 
Princess, The, 730 
Prior, Matthew (1664-1721), 556-8 
Procter, Bryan Waller (1787-1874), 717 
Progress of the Soul, The, 367 
Prologue and Epilogue, The, 498-9 
Prologues, G. Douglas's, 192 
Prolusions^ Capell's, 201 
Prometheus Unbound, 670 
Proverbial Philosophy, 739 
Proverbs of Alfred, 25, 59 
Proverbs of Hendyng, 59 
Province of jlnrisprudence Determined, 
The, 789 



8i4 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Provoked Wife, The, 494 

Psalms, Veisionsof the — A.S. 18; M.E. 

69, 70 
Pseudodoxia Epidemlca, 449-51 
Purchas, Samuel (i575?-i626), 381 
Purple Island, The, 360 
Pusey, Edward Bouverie (1800-82), 790 
Puitenham, George (i6th cent.), 306 
pyginalioii's Image, 2rjg 

QUARLES, Francis ('1592-1644), 428 
Quarterly Revieis), The, 662, 694-5 
Queen Annelida, 123 
Queen A fab, 669 sq. 
Queen Magdalene, Deploration of, 179 
Queen Margaret, The Miseries of, 352 
Quevedo's Visions, L'Estrange's, 525 
?wte 

RADCLIFFE, Mrs. (1764-1822), 611 

Rae, Mr. W. Eraser, 647 note 

Raleigh, Mr. W. A., 598 note 

Raleigh, Sir Walter (i552?-i6i8), 300 

Ralph Roister Doisfer, 228 

Rambler, The, 614 sq. 

Ramsay, Allan (1686-1758), 580, 593 

Randolph, Thomas (1605-35), 421. 436 

Rape of Lucrece, The, 318, 319 

Rape of the Lock, The, 550 sq., 730 

Rassdas, 615 sq. 

Rauf Coilycar, 195 

Ravenshoe, 755 

Reade, Charles (1814-84), 750 

Recreations of Christopher North, 696 

Recruiting Officer, The, 495 

Reeve, Clara (1729-1807), 610 

Reflections on the French Revolution, 

628 sq. 
Reginald Dalton, 688 
Rehearsal, The, 491, 497, 641 
Relapse, The, 494 
Religio Laid, 474 
Religio Medici, 449-50 
Religious Musings, 655 
Reliquiae Antiquae, 114 notes 
Reliquies, Percy's, 573, 580-1 
Remarks on Italy, 536-7 
Renaissance, Studies in the, 773 
Renaissance in Italy, History of the, 

772 
Repressor, Pecock's, 205-8 
Resolves, Felltham's, 455 



Retaliation, 619 

Return from Parnassus, The, 281 note 

Revenge, The, 560, 637 

Revenger's Tragedy, The, 349 

Review, Defoe's, 547 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-92), 632, 771 

"Rhetoric," 158, and Book IV. passitn 

Rhetoric, Art of, Wilson's, 237 

" Rhyme," 18, 45 note, 49, 58 

Rhyming Poem, The, 18 

Richard Cceur de Lion, 90-92 

Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), 598- 

601 
Richard the Redeless, 137 note 
Ring and the Book, 7/^6^,734 
Ritson, Joseph (1752-1803), 82 note, 158 

note, 166 note 
Rival Ladies, The, 497 
Rival Queens, The, 502 
Rivals, The, 640-1 
Robene and Makyne, 184-5 
Robert Manning (or of Brunne) (i3fh- 

14th cent.), 65 sq., 70, 87 and note 
Robert of Gloucester (13th cent.), 63 sq. 
Robertson, William (1721-93), 624 
Robinson Crusoe, 547-8 
Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of (1648- 

80), 480-1 
Roderick Random, 605 sq. 
Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855), 715 
Rolland, John (_/?. 1560), 459 
Rolle, R. See Hampole 
Rolliad, The, 596 
Romances, Collections of, 82 note, 

102-3 "'>^'^ 
English Charlemagne, loi 
Minor prose, 199 note 
Romeo and yuliet, 321 
Rosalyndc, 325 
Rosamond, 537 
Rosciad, The, 584 
Roscoe, William (1753-1831), 708 
Roscommon, W. Dillon, Earl of (1633- 

85), 482 
Rose, Romance or Romaunt of the, or 

Roman de la, 119 sq.. Books IH. and 

W. passim 
Rose and the Ring, The, 745 
" Rose Aylmer," 673 
Rossetti, Christina Georgina (1830-94), 

779-83 [83 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-82), 779- 



INDEX 



Sis 



Roundabout Papers, The, 745 
Rover, The, Mrs. Behn's, 489 
Rovers, The, Canning's, 641 
Rovve, Nicholas (1674-1718), 504-5 
Rowlands, Samuel (i57o?-i630?), 355 
Rowley, William (i585?-i642?), 349 
Rowley poems, the, 585-6 
Ruin, The, 15, 16 
Rule a Wi/c and Have a Wife, 340 
Rural Sports, 559 

Ruskin, Mr. John {b. 1819), 769-72 
Ruthwell Cross, the, 11 and note 

SACKVILLE, Charles, Earl of Dorset 

(1638-1706), 479-80 
Sackville, Thomas, Earl of Dorset 

(i536?-i6o8), 256 
Sad Shepherd, The, 335 
Sainte-More, Benoit de, 124 
St. Ives, 757 

Saint's Tragedy, The, 753 
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 337 
Samsott Agonistes, 398 
Sandys, George (1578-1644), 409 and 

note 
Sartor Resarhis, 686, 706, 759 sq. 
Satire of the Three Estates, 177-8 
Satironiastix, 344 

Savage, Richard (1697-1743), 577-8 
Sawles Warde, 56 
Sayers, Frank (1763-1817), 596 
Scholar Gipsy, The, 35 
School for Scandal, The, 640-1 
Schoolmaster, The, 239-40 
Schoolmistress, The, 573 
School of Abuse, The, 232 
Scornful Lady, The, 340 
Scot, Reginald (i538?-99), 357 
Scott, Alexander (i525?-84?), 459-60 
Scott, Michael (1789-1835), 689-90 
^ Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 57, 84 

note, 91, 663-6, 677-81, 694 
Scourge of Villainy, 279 
Scudery, Madeleine de, 484 
Seafarer, The, 16 
Seasons, The, 567 sq. 
Second Shepherds' Play, The, 217 
Sedley, Sir Charles (i639?-i7oi), 480-1, 

489 
Sejanus, 334 

Selborne, Natural History of, 648 
Selden, John (1584-1654), 380 



Sempills, the, 458 

Seneca, the tragedian, and Senecan 

plays, 251, 288 
Sense and Sensibility, 682-3 
Sentimental Journey, A, 607 sq. 
Sermons, importance of, 382-3 
Settle, Elkanah (1648-1724), 499, 500 
Seveti Deadly Sins, The, 187 
Seven Sages, The, 92, 93 

Rolland's, 459 
Shado'cU of AUght, The, 2,^6 
Shadwell, Charles (fl. 1718-20), 639 
Shadwell, Thomas (1642-92), 487-8 
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 

Earl of (1671-1713), 337 
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), 313- 

29 
Sharpe, C. K. 94 note 
Shaw, Quentin (15th cent.), 175 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 

669-71 
Shenstone, William (1714-63), 572-3 
Shepherd' s Calendar, The, 57, 61, 132 

note, 266-7 
Shepherd's Hunting, The, 362 
Shepherd's Pipe, The, 361 
Shepherd's Weeik, The, 559 
Sherburne, Sir Edward (1618-1702), 

427 
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816), 

639-41 
She Stoops to Conquer, 618 sq., 639 
She would if She could, 487 
Ship of Fools, The, 167 
Shirley, James (1596-1666), 223 note, 

435-6 
Shoemaker's Holiday, The, 344 
Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 546 
Short Studies, 765-6 
Short I'ieio, Collier's, ^2.6 sq. 
Sidney, Algernon (1622-82), 522 
Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86), 233, 260-4 
Siege of Rhodes, The, 485 note 
Sievers, Dr., 3 note 
Sigurd the Volsung, 63, 784 
Silent Woman, The, 334 
Si lex Scinfillans , ^16-17 
Sir Amadas, 99, loi 
Sir Beaumains, 98, 196 
Sir Charles Grandison, 599 sq. 
Sir Cleges, 98 
Sir Clyomo7t and Sir Clamydes'^Zq 



8i6 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Sir Courtly Nice, 499 

Sir Degore, ico 

Sir Degravant, 100 

Sir Eger, Sir Grime, etc., 203 

Sir Eglamour , 100 

Sir Feriimbras. loi 

Sir Fopling Flutter, 487 

Sir Gcncrydes 193 

Sir Harry Wildair, 495 

Sir Isumbras, 100 

Sir Launfal, 194 

Sir Orpheo, 96 

Sir Percevale, icx> 

Sir Thopas, 68, 82, 83 

&> Triamour, 100 

&> Tristrem, 84-86 

5z> William Wallace, 174-5 

&>«, S4S 

Sisters, The, 609 

Skeat, Professor, Bks. II. and III. W(7fej 

passim, 118 
Skelton, John (i45o?-i529), 167-70, 

479 
Skialetheia, '2jq 

Smart, Christopher (1722-71), 582-3 
Smith, Adam (1723-90), 633-4 
Smith, Alexander (1830-67), 777 
Smith, Sydney (1771-1845), 693-4 
Smollett, Tobias George (1721-71), 

605-7, 625 
Snob, The, 743 
Solomon, Prior's, 557 
Solomon and Safurnns, 18 note, 28 note 
Sommer, Dr., 261 note 
Songs of Innocence and Experience, 

S9I-2 
So?ig to David, The, 582-3 
Sonnets, 244 sg., 262-3, 276-8 

Milton's, 397-8 

Shakespeare's, 319-20 

Wordsworth's, 661 
Sonnets from the Portuguese, 738 
Sophonisba, Lee's, 502 

Marston's, 343 
Sordello, 733 
Soul to the Body, The, 14 
South, Robert (1634-17 16), 443-4 
Southerne, Thomas (1660-1746) 504-5 
Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 210 note, 

661-3, 694, 706-7 
Southwell, Robert (i56i?-95), 276 
Spanish Gipsy, The, 345 



Spanish Tragedy, The, 290 

Speak Parrot, 169 

Specimens of the British Poets, 675 

Spectator, The (171 1-14), 537 sq. 

Speculum Klcaitantis, 138 

Spenser, Edmund (15527-99), 57, 81, 

132 note, 165, 264-70 
Spenser Redivivus, 571 7iote 
Spleen, The, 572 
Splendid Shilling, The, 556 
Sprat, Thomas (1635-1713), 507, 512 
Squire Meldrum, 177 
Squire of Alsatia, The, 488 
Squire of Low Degree, The, 97, 98 
Stanley, 'I'homas (1625-78), 427 
Staple of News, The, 335 
State of Innocence, The, 498 
State Poems, The, 482 note 
Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729), 533-9 
Steel Glass, the, 256 
Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames (1829-94), 

790 
Sterne, Laurence (1713-68), 607-9 
Stevenson, John Hall (1718-85), 596 

tiote 
Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour (1850- 

94). 756-7 
Still, John (i543?-i6o8), 228-9 
Stirling, William Alexander, Earl of 

(15677-1640), 462-3 
Strafford, 733 
Strayed Reveller, The, 775 
Strode, Ralph (14th cent.), 142 note 
Studies of Sensation and Event, 786 
Sublime and Beautiful, The, 628 
Suckling, Sir John (16097-1642), 422-3, 

436 
Sullen Lovers, The, 488 
Sumer is icumen in, 40 note, 66 
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of (1517?- 

47), 243 sq. 
Susan, The Pist}'l of, 107-8 
Sweet, Mr., 19, 20 
Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 528-33, 

564-6 
Swinburne, Mr., 76. 
Syllabic equivalence, 46 
Sylvester, Joshua (1563-1618), 353-4 
Sylvia, 771 
Symonds, John Addington (1840-93), 

772 



INDEX 



817 



TABLE TALK, Selden's, 380 

Talc of a Tub, A, 528 sq. 

Talfourd, Sir Thomas Noon (1795- 

1854), 721 note 
Taiiiburlame, 291, 292 
Tancrcd and Gismund, 231 
Tassso, Fairfax's, 357 
Tatlcr, The (1709-11), 530 J^. 
Taylor, Sir Henry (1800-86), 720-1 
Taylor, Bishop Jeremy (1613-67), 439- 

41 
Taylor, John, "the Water Poet" (1580- 

1653). 355 
Tears of Fancy, The, 273 
Tempest, The, 328-9 

Teniple, Sir William (1628-99), 509-10 
Temple, The, 415 
Ten Brink, Professor, his Histoty, i 

note, 39 note, 54 
Tender Husband, The, 535 
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-92), 727- 

32 
Tennyson, Charles (1808-79), 727 ;w/^ 
Tennyson, Frederick (1807-98), 727 

note 
Testament and Complaint of Creseide, 

183-4 
Testament and Complaint of the Papyjtgo, 

178 
Testament of Love, The, 145 note 
Thackeray, William Makepeace (181 1- 

63), 604, 743-7 
Thalaba, 662-3 

Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings , 264 
Theobald, Lewis ( 7-1744), 649 
Theoria Sacra, 518 
Theory of the Moral Sentimeiit, 633 
Thersites, 225 
Thirlwall, Bishop Connop (1797-1875), 

710-11 
Thistle and the Rose, The, 187 
" Thomas the Rhymer," 84 
Thomson, James (ist) (I700-48), 567- 

71. 637 
Thomson, James (2nd) (1834-82), 785-6 
Thorkelin, G. J., 4 
Thornton MS., 100 sq. 
Thorpe, B., 2 note, 17 notes 
Thoughts on Man, 635 
Thoughts on the Present DisconteJits, 

628 sq. 
"Three Trees, Story of the," 71, 72 
3G 



Tickell, Thomas (1676-1740), 556 

Tillotson, John (1630-94), 507, 510 

Tintern Abbey, 659 sq. 

' Tis Pity she's a Whore, 433 

To^n yones, 602 sq. 

Tom Thumb, 485, 601 

Torrent of Portugal, 193 

TottcVs Miscellany, 248-50 

Toulmin-Smith, Miss L., 221 

Tournament of Tottenham, 99, 100 

Tourneur, Cyril ( ?- ?), 279, 

341. 349 
Towneley Plays, The, 221 sq. 
Toxophilus, 239 

Transformed Metamorphosis, The, 279 
Traveller, The, 617 sq. 
Treasure Island, 757 
Treatise of Human Nature, 623 
Trench, Archbishop Richard Chenevix 

(1807-86), 739 
Trevisa, John of ( ?-i4i3), 147-8 

Tripartite Chronicle, The, 138 note, 139 
Tristram Shandy, 607 sq. 
Trivia, 559 

Trivial Poems and Triolets, 425 
Troilus and Cressid, Chaucer's, 124 

Dryden's, 498 
Trollope, Anthony (1815-82), 750-1 
True-Born Englishman, The, 547 
Tucker, Abraham (1705-74), 334 
Tundale, Visions of 199 note 
Tupper, Martin Farquhar (1810-89), 23, 

739 
Turberville, George (15307-90?), 253-4 
Turner, Sharon (1768-1847), 708 
Tusser, 'Thomas (15157-80), 253 
Tina Mary it Wetnen and the Wedo, 

The, 128, 186-7 
Twelflh Night, 324 
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 322-3 
Tzt)o Noble Kinsmen, The, 329 
Twopenny Postbag, The, 674. 
Tzw Years Ago, 755 
Tyndale, Matthew (14857-1536), 212-13 
Tyratinic Love, 497 
Tyrwhitt, Thomas (1730-86), 118 

UDALL, Nicholas (15167-56). 228 

Universal Passion, The, 560 

i')n Burial, 451 

Urquhart, Sir Thomas (1605-60), 464 

Usk, 'Thomas (14th cent.) , 145 note 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLLSH LITERATURE 



Ussher, James (1581-1656), 384 
Utopia, 211 

VALERIUS, 688 

Vanbrugh, Sir John (i666?-i726), 

493-4 
Vanity Fair, 744-5 
Vanity of Human Wishes, The, 557, 

614 sq. 
Vathek, 610-11 

Vaughan, Henry (1622-95), 4^6 
Venice Preserved, 497, 500-2 
Venus and Adonis, 317-18 
Vercelli Book, The, 10 sq. 
Vere, Sir Aubrey de (1788-1846), 717 
Vernon MS., 105-7 
Vestiges of Creation, The, 793 
Vicar of Wakefield, The, 618 sq. 
" Vice," the, of early plays, 226 note 
Village, The, 591 
Villon, F., 153 
Vindication of A'afural Society, A, 628 

sq. 
Virgidemiarum , 279 
Virgin Martyr, Tlie, 433 
Vision of Judgment, A, Byron's 663 

Southey's, 663 
Visions of Tundale, 199 note 
Vita Gildae, 42 and note 
Vittoria Corombona, 347 
Volpone, 334 

Vox and the Wolf, The, 61 tiote 
Vox Clamantis, 138 
Vulgar Errors, 450-1 

WAGE, 43 

Wakefield Plays, The, 221 sq. 
Waldhere, 7 

Wallace, Sir William, 174-5 
Waller, Edmund (1605-87), 406-8 
Walpole, Horace (1717-97), 610, 621 
Walsh, William (1663-1708), 482 
Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, 42 
Walton, Izaak (1593-1683), 456 
Wanderer, The, A.S., 16 

Savage's, 578 
Warburton, Bishop William (1698- 

1779) , 632-3 
Ward, Dr. A. W., 549 note 
Ward, Mr. Humphry, 582 
Warner, William (15587-1609), 275 
War-songs, Campbell's, 676 



Warton, Joseph (1722-1800), 583 
Warton, Thomas (1728-90), 583-4; 
his History of Poetry, 39 note, 584 
and note 

Water Babies, The, 755 
Watson, Thomas (1557-92), 273 

Wavcrlcy and The Waverley Novels, 
678-81 

H 'ay of the World, The, 493 

Wealth of Nations, The, 633 
Webbe, William (i6th cent.), 271, 

306 
Weber, Henry, 82 note and sq. 
Webster, John ( ?- ?), 341, 346-8 
Wedderburns of Dundee, the, 458, 465 
note 

\ ] 'ecpcr. The, 414 

Weir of Hermiston, 757 
Werfrith, Bishop (9th cent.), 28 note 

Wcstioard Ho ! 754-5 

Whale, The, 14 

What You Will, 343 

Whetstone, George ( ?- ?), 252-3 

" Whistlecraft," 596 note 

White, Gilbert (1720-93), 648 

White, Henry Kirke (1785-1806), 716 

White Devil, The, 347 

Why come ye not to Court, 170 

Widsith, "-3 

Wife's Complaint, The, 17 

Wild Gallant, The, 484 sq. 
Wild, Robert (17th cent.), 425 
Wilkins, Bishop John (1614-72), 446 

William of Paler ne, 105 
William of Shoreham, 70, 71 
Williams, Sir Charles Hanbury (1709- 

59), 596 note, 621 
Willoughby's Avisa, 277 
Wilson, John (dramatist) (i622?-9o?), 

484 note 
Wilson, John (essayist, etc.) (1785- 

1854). 695-7 
Wilson, Sir Thomas ( ?-i58i), 237 
Winchelsea, Anne Finch, Countess of 
(1660-1720), 562-3 

Windsor Forest, 550 sq. 

Wine, 559 

Winter, 567 sq. 

Winter's Tale, A, 328 

Winzet, Ninian (1518-92), 466 

l\ 'ishes to his Supposed Mistress, 414 

Witch, The, 345 



INDEX 



819 



IViicA of Atlas, The, 670 
Wither, George (1588-1667), 361-2 
Wolcot, John (1738-1819), 596 and note 
Woman in the Aloon, The, 284 
Woman Killed with Kindness, A, 346 
Women beware Women, 345 
Wood, Anthony (1632-95), 525 
.Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 553 

note, 562, 657-61 
World, The, 620-1 
Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary (1689- 

1762) , 642-4 
Wotton, Sir Henry (1568-1639), 381 
Wright, Thomas (1810-77), 44 note, 53 

note, 60 note, 66 
Wulfstan, Bishop (nth cent.), 28 
Wulfstan, explorer, 23 



Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503-42), 243 sq. 

Wycherley, William (i640?-i7i5), 489- 

91 

Wyclif, John (i32o?-i384), 145-7 
Wyntoun, Andrew (i35o?-i42o?), 102 
7tote, 173 

YARDLEY OAK, 589 

Yeast, 754 

York Plays, The, 221 sq. 

Yorkshire Tragedy, The, 329 

Young, Edward (1681-1765), 560-1, 637 

Ywain and Gawain, 95, 96 

ZELUCO, 612 
Zepheria, zjj and note 
Zupitza, Dr., 94 note 



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